


Without rules

by Korolevich_Elisei



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Light Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-11
Updated: 2017-08-11
Packaged: 2018-12-14 00:07:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11771313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Korolevich_Elisei/pseuds/Korolevich_Elisei
Summary: Years one by another break down in the hot summer, and here they are already eighteen, they are scattering around the city, thrown away from each other by a hundred circumstances, not friends and not "nobody" to each other. They did not understand anything, did not see, and it seems that the past will remain in the past, but Fate, this stubborn bitch, never lets people go just like that.





	Without rules

**Author's Note:**

> Originally, this story was written in another language. I needed some practice in using English, so I decided to translate my own text. Alas, English is not my native language, and I assume that it is VERY noticeable. I apologize in advance for anything that can terrify you in this fanfic, from grammar and spelling to word selection. I know that my complex sentences are too complicated. If you decide to read it - thanks, guys.

 

 <1>

Light of the old street lamps in cold spots spread on a court. Shouts, abuses, curt commands and hoarse breath united into a muffled background and, as if through the thickness of water, beat the eardrums. If the basketball court could turned into a ring, at its very edge Kuroko would stand on. Players – ten high, flexible figures as if huge cats on two paws, – rushed on the asphalt at a terrifying speed. It seemed, they didn't stop not for a moment, and some animal wildness appeared in their sharp movements. Someone fell knocked off the feet, scratched the palms, rose again, and then the actions flashed like on the screen: pass, jog, opposition to the guard and pass again. They played basketball as if they fought with each other and there was nothing but a naked scaffold of the game: only the main rules and the score which was traced with chalk behind the court marking. They played dirty, fiercely, in the way they would never dare to play on the parquet and there were no rules which they would submit to.

 “All roads lead to Rome” – the phrase of another world, another country and absolutely other people but there is something mystical in it, frightening in its inflexibility, like the fate which impends over Oedipus. It isn't about political influence or peculiarities of transport communications of Romans, the gist of it is that wherever you go, wherever you strive, the fate will sink its teeth in the nape of your neck and will drag you through the mud and stones exactly there where you have to appear. Fate is an obstinate dodgy bitch who throws you in a wall over and over again so that you breach this wall.

Kuroko didn't know why he left his house that evening. Stuffy summer covered the city with heavy heat, it was trickling through cracks in windows, was wrapping around blades of fans with viscous heat, and there was no rescue from it, neither within walls nor behind them. Days passed slowly as pitch and clockwise moved a little just to return to the same point. Opened textbooks and a notebook lay in front of Kuroko on the table and dust motes wheeled round in the last sheen of the sunset, probably, the same motes as were there the last two months. The black hieroglyphs pressed into the paper were flowing, as if becoming deeper, and it seemed to Tetsuya that if he read any more it would make him barf with his insides. And it seemed to him that heavy lead spheres were dashing against internal walls of his skull, breaking the bones, and among this billiards there was no place to a single formula or a thesis. In the all four corners of his room there was no place for Kuroko himself.

It was necessary to Tetsuya to run, if not from the heat than from the oppressive silence of his own room, and precisely that he made, having hastily pulled a t-shirt.

The sky drowned in gray twilight and went beyond the lattice of the bound fingers. Kuroko wondered along the sidewalk, threw back the head, and rushing by cars stunned him with the roar. Tetsuya always thought that he studied well, anyhow, when he really gave a thought to it – a few seconds a day, between bumps of a heavy ball against the parquet, – but it appeared that being a good passer was not enough to pass into the Tokyo University. Streets squirmed like snakes, rubbed zebras crossings jumped under his feet, and lamps were being lit up by tens. Sun blinds of shops were closing, and chandlers vanished long ago – the way was becoming purer, as if a burned field. Now Kuroko had a lot of time for thinking, even too much, and piles of books spread out in his small room didn’t interrupt this process not for a moment.

Kuroko had no problems with goals, there were no problems with sweating blood, but for the first time in three years he felt like a child who was lost at the metro station. In April, having received the certificate, he crossed some kind of a line, and since then he could not breathe deeply. "You play basketball because you like it; You play basketball to win,” Kuroko didn’t notice how he built his whole life on this foundation, did it so confidently as if the joyful sixteen were going to last eternally. As well as the people he used to pass the ball to.

People disappear from your life. Constantly. Funny, as it was Tetsuya who was used to being a phantom.

The sidewalk did not end but Kuroko was all right with it because somewhere deep down inside he didn’t want to stop. He kept walking and walking along those roads, where he usually didn’t turn off to, hanging around aimlessly – seven miles aren’t a detour for a rabid dog - and there was a feeling that something was still pushing him in the back, with the reins of chance choosing turns for him.

And in the end he was there where two basketball courts and five dozen people fit in a cage of wire and iron; twenty players rushed along the asphalt on either side of Kuroko, and two striped orange balls rang among the cries of the crowd.

Tetsuya was brought to the court by a hubbub, which was rude and drunk-like, but so similar to the familiar shouts of stands. He reached Kuroko through the canal, clung to the consciousness and didn’t let go. Tetsuya stopped at the bridge, peering musingly into the gathering darkness. On the other side of the half-empty concrete channel, under the blinding lights of the street lamps, shadows flounced about. They separated from each other and merged again into the total mass, so, from afar, resembling a pack of dogs, from which alternately sticked out someone's head or someone's tail.

Kuroko never thought about what would happen to him after school. But he should have to, because that’s why, apparently, this fucking two-month summer transition through the stuffiness, heat and loneliness, which was like wandering in the desert, tore out from his life everything that made it valuable. Large and small pieces – it was torn in shreds.

Having just risen wind ruffled the light hair, cicadas chirped in the grass. The sky was growing darker, and the contours of the shadows under the lanterns were becoming more and more distinct. Kuroko could turn back, could pass by - in the end, fate consists of every choice of yours, - but exactly at the moment when Tetsuya nearly turned away, Fate, this stubborn bitch, made the choice for him, and whether it really was or that was just Kuroko, a rumble of a basketball ring shaking from the blow emerged. It was a rumble that Kuroko  would dream of  for nights, along with dozens of familiar voices, with ghostly touches to the skin and something so tingly-painful that Tetsuya didn’t know the word for it.

And Tetsuya chose the bridge.

He exhaled, pulled the T-shirt down and, not really understanding what for, went along the parapet. "I'll think of something,"  the words with which so often he replaced an explanation for all the fragility and variability of the world in which he existed.

Kuroko crossed the bridge, turned right toward the canal, and went on to the sound and light, and that's how the Roman gladiators probably felt when the sun and the roar of the arena would blind them.

Behind the large grid Hell was raging. Like proud towers the four rings reached out to the first stars, and under them, erasing the old marking, players streaked like flocks of wild dogs.

The game is always excitement, it does not matter whether you run with the ball or watch how it's done by someone else. That is why stadiums are full, that's why bookmakers are not closed. Tetsuya didn’t know what it was - not exactly a streetball, the square was wrong as well as the rules - and the bets were being accepted on the spot, spontaneously and with a note, but by the time Kuroko made his way through the crowd to one of the courts he already wasn’t interested.

The air on these square pieces of earth was saturated with adrenaline and passion, like with opium. Many times Tetsuya had seen playing basketball in the daylight but he has never seen this game at night. Whether it depended on the time of day, on the place or on the consciousness of freedom but that were demons who rushed on the court in front of Kuroko. They laughed, didn't shun the battle, and with every throw they broke into shards the apparition of rules which was smoldered with the arrival of darkness.

Kuroko was standing and staring as if he had grown into the ground, another hypnotized among the crowd, until someone hit him, almost knocking out his spirit.

 “Fuck!” There was a push in the back, Tetsuya was thrown forward on the neighbors and then back - sobering suddenly. Anger, so strong and so unwonted, lashed its jaws, and Kuroko turned around, clenching it in his fists.

“Shiba-kun?”

“Kuroko? Well, fuck,” the guy snorted, glancing at Tetsuya. “And where did _you_ come from?”

“Just walking,” Kuroko almost answered, extremely impolite, but was there a country more highbred than Japan?

“Oh, what an eye, is that how they look at childhood friends?” Shiba was indignant, his face glistened with sweat, and he began to wipe it with a t-shirt collar.

Hits of the basket ball filled the night, Tetsuya turned to the sound in spite of himself.

“Sorry, I'm just ...”

“Awfully nice as usual,” Shiba snorted, taking Kuroko by the shoulder, extremely familiar. "I hope it did not sound too gay. I have not seen you for ages. I mean, I did not see you at all, not as usual. I did not even run into you in the subway. Well, you understand. And we live on the same street!”

“Yes, there was a bit of a setback,” Kuroko nodded, apathetically and cold, subtle emotions wasn't his specialty.

“How the fuck did it happen that no one hit you here ...”

“Well, for now it was only you who tried,” Shiba’s eyes moved constantly, Tetsuya felt annoyed by his closeness and wanted to wriggle out or push him away. “By the way, and you are here ...”

The crowd exploded with shouts.

“Have you really made a bet?” Shiba grabbed Kuroko by the shoulders, and just like that, face to face, a strange shine in his dilated pupils began to be noticeable. “Probably, for the first time, eh?  I see that it’s your first time, looking at you it immediately comes clear that you are not in the subject. Guess what, they have a tournament for survival here! It is the semi-final now, the teams are almost dead – you take that they have had four games in a row, but they jump out of their pants, I have never seen shit like this,”  he was saying, choking on words, and suddenly pulled Tetsuya to the second court  which was a couple meters away. “They play two halves, but you can die for that! You can still bet, for an awesome interest!”

“Wait, what bets ...” Kuroko started, but Shiba was one of those who like to talk and not to listen, actually that's why they were childhood friends.

“Listen to me, Kuroko, buddy, and you'll be in chocolate. There is one awesome guy here, he rips everyone to pieces! This command is definitely gonna ...”

Lamps blinded his eyes, and shouts hit the ears - too much flesh was around, too many people, after a tiny stifling room it was too much for sure, and three additional centimeters on which Kuroko stretched up in high school did not make any difference in this crowd. He was used to being on the court, he was used to playing - not to bet and tolerate being jostled with one’s elbows and have his feet squeezed. He, an eternal ghost, still was not used to being behind the scenes.

 “Hey, why are you so inhibited,” Shiba was chattering, tearing Kuroko's shoulder with his brotherly grip. “Basketball is your element!”

 “The element is mine, the pond is not the right one ... By the way, Shiba-kun, and who did arrange it?” asked Kuroko frowning, but a childhood friend did not even have time to laugh in his face.

On the opposite court a dark figure shoot its way, broke through to the ring with a rapid swoop, and the metal pillar rang hollowly because of the strength with which the dunk was shot. Screams of the spectators spread the night apart – sound was most deafeningly that Tetsuya had ever heard - but it’s power was weaker than the sensation that had knocked Kuroko out when he saw this figure rushing, it seemed, directly on him.

Fate did not care about the Probability theory. She did not care about explanations. She would just throw people together, again and again, until they understood what she was trying to tell them.

Kuroko recognized Aomine at once, while he was still in a snatch, in a jump to the ring. He wore an unusual white singlet and an unbuttoned shirt was waving behind his back - a completely different image, containing more freedom than could be conveyed in words - but Kuroko did not think "he resembles", did not think that he had confused something. There were times when Daiki would found Tetsuya by breathing and Kuroko did not need even so little. There are people who, without even noticing, leave too deep marks in you.

“Check it out!” Shiba was screeching somewhere to the left as if way beneath water depth, far, far away and not real. “Stone me, what a guy! It is five thousand yen, you see, five pieces!”

"Congratulations on winning," Tetsuya thought, and there would  have been more joy in his inner voice if he at least had found the strength to take a step back. Or move his little finger.

Aomine - shabby, sweaty - flew forward inertially, sweeping the crowd like a stormy wind, and asphalt responded to his steps with a shuffling sound. And so Diaki, the embodiment of all that Tetsuya could never define, stopped at the edge of the basketball court, tiredly finger-combing his wet hair.

He wasn’t supposed to be there. By all rules, he wasn’t supposed to be there.

There were more than fifty of them: basketball players and just fans - a whole sea of people, ridiculously monotonous in their differences. But Tetsuya stood less than half a meter away, threw back his head as he always had to, and waited. Because anyone could - except Aomine. Aomine always saw and noticed him.

Tetsuya waited. Daiki shook his head, took a bottle of water from someone's hands and almost turned away, but for a moment his eyes widened, as if from surprise, and his gaze froze in a dark blue, lifeless haze. Kuroko's heart, the stupid heart, a fibrous-muscular hollow organ, grew for some reason and tried to break the chest.

Aomine saw him, he recognized him, and his dark lips suddenly curved in an awkward grin.

 “Would you join?“ Daiki nodded towards the court without taking his eyes from Kuroko, as if calling, and, had thrusted the bottle in Kuroko’s hands, went to the panting team at the benches. The bright light cut out his figure from the background as if everything except Daiki was cardboard.

So there was a basketball court similar to a prize ring. The place was  the one where Kuroko could not imagine himself. There was Aomine who emerged from nowhere. Who asked if Kuroko could  face the challenge. Aomine who wanted to play against him.

Why shouldn't he?

 “Do you need a sixth player?” Tetsuya asked coming very close to the captain of the second team and this tall guy who looked very harsh jumped with surprise like a frightened cat.

 “Who are you, you fucking…?!” there was a rush and the team pulled away just the same. The reaction was quite usual, except that one player who didn’t move. Holding his throat, he stood bent over and his mouth produced eerie, stiff rattles.

 “Well, we are fucked up” someone said looking at this guy - not trying to help. "What shall we do, Nedji? If we do not replace him, we're completely out.

 “We will be disqualified in the fucking finals” the rest of the players picked up, “What a crap!”.

It seemed that Tetsuya just had this kind of day - when he had to wait. So he had been waiting patiently those ten seconds that Nedji was looking at his random, piked up by sortition team, at the choking outsider and Kuroko himself – at an inconspicuous pale guy with pieces of ice instead of eyes.

 “All right than,” Nedji sighed nervously, wiping the sweat from his face. "You," he pointed at Kuroko. "Can you play at least?"

 “Have won the cup of winter and summer games” the other answered.

 “I get it” Nedji grimaced. "Just do not get under feet. Akira, all the guard is on you, we сover. Let's go and tear these undershots!”

Four players marched out to the court - the black rough surface - and dispersed, with the first insinuating steps stopping to be human beings. Kuroko pulled off his T-shirt, left it behind the basketball ring and went out after the team under the blinding light of the street lamps. He counted inhalations as if for his first time playing the game, and with each exhalation the surrounding world disappeared slowly, layer by layer, frontier by frontier, until there was only a black court left, without spectators, without sky, without rules. Until there was only basketball left.

“Go!” the crowd roared from the darkness and the whistle tore their cry. There was a leap, hands flashed in the deathly pale light, and the game began.

 Beaten by the point guard, the ball, as an orange meteor, swept through the air, and the players rushed forward, following Nedji. Point guard of the second team - the team Kuroko become part of for these two halves - set a furious pace, shifted the players into a reckless attack, and Tetsuya thought for a second what Isuki-kun would have said if he had seen it all. Tetsuya thought and forgot right then.  Rapture of the game seemed to flow in him along with the blood.

They barely got to the front line. Moving along the edge of the court, Kuroko had time to see only a shadow that had gotten in the Nedji’s way, and immediately turned and ran to the opposite side, without waiting for the shooting guard trying to dribble. Against Aomine the guy did not even have a chance.

It was almost ridiculous. Time was passing by but the only one in whom Kuroko was always sure was Aomine.

Daiki tackled the ball as easily as if he had taken it away from a child, gave a pass, and the first team immediately went on a quick breakthrough. Like a wave reaching a shore, the game moved backwards. Kuroko ran for dear life, his chest cracked  painfully, a small forward was dribbling  the ball just in a couple of steps but Tetsuya did not wait until he clashed with a center. One more effort, Kuroko knocked the ball from the opponent, and the next second the defense flew at the last. But the ball was already in the playmaker’s  hands  and not that he understood how this happened.

 “Ran, bitch!” Nedji shouted, and somewhere on the other side of the court Aomine grinned.

The only thing left for Kuroko was to inhale as deep as he could. In these twenty minutes no one would put him on the bench.

That evening the line "to a fault" ceased to be just youth slang. Players fell, scratched their knees, yelled at each other and continued to lead the ball, breathing hoarsely and intermittently through the crooked grins. Kuroko did not know these people, did not know what they were capable of, and they themselves, united only by a sortition, were acquaintances just by passes, but in this dirty street game names did not matter and, perhaps, despite the squabbles, insults and readiness to bare the teeth, that was exactly what united them. They did not play basketball so much as they rushed forward, as if they were alive only as long as they moved, but they found a joy in it, a low, wild pleasure, and at least  this Tetsuya could understand.

Do whatever you want if only it makes you happy.

In the midst of this organized madness Kuroko faced the most aggressive guard that he had seen in his life, with the rudest passes and rebounds;  by the end of the first half - quite conditional it was- his hands hurt incredibly, though he did not even give his crown strike for there was no one to accept it. No one tried to knock Tetsuya off his feet, and his team members would pulled away from Kuroko as well as opponents did, but already in the fifth minute Yarite, the easy forward, broke through to the ring with firm confidence that at the last moment Tetsuya would send him the ball.

They scored sixteen points. Of course, this wasn’t enough.

 “You are playing with a half of your abilities,” Kuroko had a minute, an absurd timeout, and he spent seconds, tossed his head back, to look Aomine in the eye. Aomine, who should not have been there. "It's not like you."

 “If I give my best I will get bored.” Daiki grinned, wiping his face with the shirt sleeve, a new habit that Kuroko did not know about.

 “I doubt that this is possible in such a company.”

“Appreciated the mores, eh, Tetsu?”

“I'm not sure that I fully understand what is happening.”

"Do not understand anything," said Aomine leaning over to Kuroko’s face, singing with the heat of his body and the darkness at the bottom of his iris. "Go and play, goddammit."

 Kuroko raised his fair eyebrows.

“Does it seem that I need to be said this?”

A warning whistle was heard.

“It was never needed. Come on, show your teeth," Daiki grinned, slapping Tetsuya on the bare shoulder and went towards ring.

“Let’s kick asses of these freaks?!” Yarite shouted, raising his fist.

“No sweat,” answered Kuroko, sensing the fiery mark of the touch on his skin, and moved to his position. Dirty game, fouls and inappropriate aggression angered him but the hurricane raging around picked up his heart rate as well, and in the second half, Tetsuya did exactly what Aomine said - showed his teeth. And in return the game swallowed him.

 The only thing that stayed was the sensation of the own body - a perfect mechanism, - signs of the playmaker and the relentless all-overlapping  feeling of Aomine's presence on the court. It was almost like a sexual arousal: it giddied his head, squeezed the guts with a fiery fist and with a broad palm washed everything that was out of the court. Kuroko had never seen the way he had seen this night, and had never ran so fast. Never Tetsuya was in this state when rules were rubbed against the asphalt by sneakers’ soles.

 “Fucking awesome, isn’t it?” Daiki whispered to him before tackling the ball and rushing towards the ring; the hoarse low voice chilled Kuroko to the bone.

They played against each other, but Tetsuya wasn't able to get off from an obsessive, exhausting illusion that on the court he, Aomine and the basketball alone were. Sometimes he would catch himself thinking that he was about to give a pass to Daiki. Last time it was so long ago that even a memory would cause his guts to be squeezed with a steel grip but Kuroko continued to play. Because he wanted to.

The final whistle drew the last line but the players, like bullets fired, uselessly moved for a few more seconds. Tetsuya stopped in the middle of the court, scarcely breathing, and threw back his head, looking for the traces of stars in the sky. His team lost, Aomine crushed them - always did, you run or you do not run - but Tetsuya completely didn’t give a fuck about the victory because for the first time in six months he felt really alive. He spread himself, worked oneself to a frazzle, and his legs barely held him, Yarite, swearing like a sailor, patted his hair - and these were exactly the feelings worthy the minutes spent in the game.

In his eyes everything was going  black, the world was shrinking to the dazzling street lamps. Kuroko inclined his head to the one side and from the crowd of half-dead players and drunk with the show fans he caught Aomine. During the match as well as at this moment he was like a beast – a beast who went through the non-stop eighty minutes of the game - he was exhausted and burned out, and muscles burned under his skin, but Tetsuya easily caught his wide happy smile. In this they were the same - all the players were the same. Everybody was addicted to it.

Even if the players of "Generation of Miracles" were beasts, demanding monstrous doses.

 

<2>

 

Major part of the human life goes on in the struggle not with the outside world but with oneself, because - and it must be of some cruel joke, - we seem to be programmed for doing the same mistakes. And in order to avoid doing them again and again, you have to work hard; you have to put an invisible gum band on your wrist and snap it every time when a thorn bush you climb into seems to be too familiar.

Sometimes the gum band tears.

The scorching sun, like a curse, slowly rolled across the sky, and huge rectangles of light moved around the stuffy class, like arrows on a watch face, slowly and synchronously. In this haze the buttoned up shirt squeezed the throat with its collar, and the jacket turned into a heavy, ridiculous shell. Kuroko unsuccessfully tried to breathe with his full chest then put down his pencil and ran his fingers into the disheveled hair. For some reason, it felt like invisible scratches on the sticky sweaty skin were itching.

Tetsuya was a calm guy. He always was calm, stubborn and dreamy and he always knew what to do - even if it meant simply not giving up. An excellent samurai would come out of him a few centuries ago, some Ruroni Kenshin: glorious, decisive and very uncorrupted. But Kuroko was an eighteen-year-old high school graduate whose life revolved exclusively around the basketball court. On the court he was a fighter, a samurai, there he would put everything on the line and there he would win. Or he would lose and take revenge.

Basketball was his only passion. And, probably, that's why Kuroko felt so bad at the moment. Because for him basketball - like compressed armature bars, like metal ingots pressed to each other for years or like roots of a tree sprouting through the concrete - for him basketball was closely interwoven with Aomine Daiki.

This is something you can’t control. Simply, one day people appear in your, people who climb into your head, launch their hands into your soul and become part of your story, your future and part of you yourself. You break down, cry, renounce, you leave the team, you find another one, you find Kagami, climb to the top, you fight and drag, drag, drag these people behind you, because they live in your head, in your heart, they are with you in any empty room, in any sport hall, next to the seats on the bus, they are hundreds of miles away, sleeping, eating, talking to someone, they do not think about you, but persistently exist in your head.

And then, when you run in them by real, when they put a can of soda next to you, they glance with a scorn at you on the court or they hang over you with all their heated body, you're scared, you rejoice and you cry at the same time. And you can’t get it out of your head - even if you know that it would be  better to, even if it was unbearably painful once already. Because the thorn bushes are always the same.

\- Read the twentieth and twenty-first chapters for tomorrow, we will discuss this and try to decide how to state the material correctly on the exam. I'm waiting for your suggestions.

The chairs and the desks started to creak, Kuroko rose from his seat, tossed the books into the backpack, in which a pair of running shoes invariably dangled, and dashed along the shaded corridor, unbuttoning all permitted buttons as he went. Doing to jiuku was his own idea, the future exams required effort, and he would ask for help when it was needed, but now, stepping out onto the red-hot porch and drowning in the heat, Tetsuya hated this place. He pulled off his jacket, rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and went to the bus stop. And he did not notice how his steps began to speed up.

Any science you would like to study, from physics to sociology, establishes its own laws and its own rules, requires the tribute of obedience, paves the ways with signs with which you have to abide by. But what would happen if these rules - the ways underfoot - disappeared overnight?

Kuroko pulled out a cell phone that showed five o'clock in the evening, the hand that clenched the plastic seemed unusually tanned, although his skin was still light comparing to the rest of the Japanese. The sun was heating his head, girls from the courses was chattering about something lined up at the bus stop. Quietly buzzing, the bus Kuroko was waiting for drove. But he did not get on it.

Momoi-san would laugh at him like a drain. Tetsuya held out for two days - only or whole, it depends on your view of the subject - but as how hungry people know where to look for food, so the obsessed  feel where to go. Seventy-third - quite unusual - route led Kuroko towards the canal, and Tetsuya looked out the window at passing house, keeping tugging the edge of his shirt and feeling like a foolish enamored schoolgirl. He was scared, he was happy, and shameful impatience contracted in his chest like a spring. Although it was unlikely that Tetsuya's appearance showed it. He was just a sweaty disheveled guy.

The radio worked quietly and someone's voice announced stops, the backpack lay on the next seat to Kuroko, and the sneakers in which he won more than one match were inside of it, at the very bottom. Not light sneakers at all, which he always carried with him.

Tetsuya didn’t even know exactly why he was going there: for the scraped asphalt or the man he could meet there. But not to come was above his own fortitude. He could refuse, if he had made up his mind, if he had convinced himself, but he did not do it. And his Fate was more than okay with it.

The grass around the court was trampled long ago, and at the time dry wind was raising dust over the courts. In the daylight, while the sun wasn’t setting yet, it was easier to see faces of the people slowly filling the court. Kuroko leaned his shoulder against the mesh, blinking because of the dust, and fingers of his free hand painfully dug into the mesh cells. It was very likely that people who came here were of the kind that you would not see on the streets in the middle of the day. They had other habits, different lear and language. Were they hiding like moles, falling asleep or mingling with the crowd - devil knows, - but after coming here, to look at the match or to participate, they had become a different tribe, somewhat homogeneous, but what could be easily broken into separate parts. And it was a shabby ball that united them all.

 “Look,  here is our old friend the illegal”, Nedji's voice, rude and low, came from somewhere behind, and Kuroko turned, adjusting the backpack on his shoulder.

Being torn from the night coolness into this summer haze, Yarite and his friend, Nadji, seemed too real to Tetsuya. Actually, he was like a child abducted by spirits and thrown then back into the human world.

 “Sakes alive! In the daylight you are even smaller!” Yarite laughed, coming closer.

 “And this man calls _me_ tactless”,  Nedji gave the other an oblique glance and shook Kuroko's hand. Strongly and inquisitively. “That's great. Have been a long time”.

 “Now it is clear, I'm sure that you are real,” Yarite was chattering, leaning towards Tetsuya. “And we were already thinking about applying to a shrink. Check it out, there was a guy playing, and then he disappeared. Tell someone – and they will not believe it. I myself, by the way, do not smoke so heavy things, so I started to worry about my own health”.

 “The half of the folks here are smoked freaks, "Nedji snorted.

Kuroko awkwardly rubbed his neck. This foul friendliness made him want to take a couple of steps back.

 “I'm sorry that I didn’t say goodbye,” he said, squinting.

“ Oh, come on ...” Yarite waved his hand, as if he used to rehearse the gesture after all the actresses of Japanese television. “What can be more killer than another city legend, especially a legend about the ghost of a basketball player”.

At least a quarter of  these legends  was on Tetsuya's account, but he decided to keep silent; the sun blinded his eyes, and Nedji looked at him as one began to look when they realized how profitable it would be to use him, Kuroko. The same shit for years, Tetsuya was ready for this. As well as he was ready for the question that Nedji asked, resembling Jumpey for a moment.

“If I ask you which team you played for, you will not answer, will you?”

“I won’t,” Kuroko nodded, covering one eye. "But you will not ask”.

 “Exactly,” Nedji grinned; actually none of these guys had any interest in names and addresses, they hardly understood why they would stray into the herd every evening, why they would create teams; they just wanted to run, be in the game, feel their own body, because sometimes basketball gave the feeling that there was nothing impossible for you. It corrupts so much, at any age - to be all-powerful. “You did well. For such a small guy.”

 “And now you're rude, Guin,” snorted Yarite, knocking the ball out of his friend's hand, ridiculously and cheekily, like all amateurs did, and it's strange that he was allowed to. "But the man is right, man. You were unfukingbelievably cool. For such a small guy.”

"Do my best," Kuroko smiled, remembering how he barely stood on his feet when he and Kagami had ripped off their first victory from Too. During those seconds, battered, broken, with every cell screaming in pain, he could look in anyone's eyes not throwing back his head.

It was a good time.

More and more people were coming around with every minute, the crowd was growing bigger, and Kuroko already began to feel this familiar vibration, coming from the ground, but actually born inside, as a response to expectation and challenge. Knowing or having seen each other, but still potential rivals, people gathered in bunches, looking around with mistrust and dangerous amusement, as if every second person was a match that could ignite the flame. Maybe they did not want to bully each other, maybe they did not feel hatred, but if your blood rushes through the veins, rousing the entire body, then that always existing hypothetical enemy has neither a face nor a name. All childish and harmless came to its end long ago, at high school; the older you get the more games resemble a death battle, a fun, reckless fight five to five. The principle of "nothing personal" would stop working as soon as players went to the court.

 “So, you gonna play?” asked Yarite, lazily knocking the ball on the asphalt, and his hands was flashing like wide wings. "Since you have come again, it's probably not for simple staring. There is another hour before the sortition, it’s enough time to warm up. If there was a wish to, we could juggle pieces of paper if you are "in". You will be in our team.

Kuroko was against both rates and scams.

 “I guess I can take it as a compliment,” Tetsuya looked from the ball to Yarite, not suspecting how inconvenient this look was.

Kuroko, having past all the torments that close people can inflict on each other, having found himself a couple of years ago, looked like an aged martial arts master who saw right through.

Although Yarite was doing well.

 “Hearing such thing from Nedji? You take it no less than the offer of the hand and the heart,” the guy confidently leaned forward, but actually he could be heard within a five meters radius. “Personally, I am fucking excited with your passes. Seriously, do agree, the game will be a killer. And we will take care you not to be injured”.

 “You better worry about yourself. Tetsu already has a cover,” a grin ready to turn towards politeness froze on his lips and the ribs seemed to contract and punched lungs, squeezing, not allowing them to inhale. Kuroko felt the weight of a one's body dropping onto his shoulder, he felt how a stranger’s face shadowed him from the sun glaring from the west, and he felt Aomine's fingers touching Kuroko’s shirt in the solar plexus region, barely touching the edge. “The charity action is over, guys.”

"Another familiar asshole," Nedji sighed, and Tetsuya felt Daiki's muscles tighten and body pressed against him. Yet Aomine only had put a hand around his neck. "Where do you all come from?"

“Your mugs remind me of someone as well.”

“Hello, Aomine-kun,” Kuroko turned his head slightly, raising his eyes, and his fair hair tickled along the dark cheek. "Would you not lean on me?"

 “Hey, you were the assholes  I broke off at the beginning of the week. What a coincidence,” Daiki  did not seem to hear Kuroko, or did not listen, which was much more likely, and the hand was still lying on his shoulder. It  had a bad influence on the Kuroko’s ability to think. “Have you decided to repeat the valuable experience?”

 “Haven’t your dentist said you that modesty is not superfluous?” asked Yarite, hiding  threat behind the crooked smile.

 “If you are so brave, speak clearly,” Aomine snorted, and fingers of the hand grasping Tatsuya interlocked on his left shoulder, as if closing a ring. “Beating snouts, of course, is not sportily, but there is nothing  you won’t do for your own shadow. Moreover, this is mutual”.

It sounded strange, especially from the mouth of a person who was not prone to excessive pathos, but even if Nedji and his friend had found out -  about the betted, not own dreams; about the defeats forgiven and the threats made on the night, - they would run from the court like the devil herself was after them. But they did not understand a thing or skillfully concealed it.

“So what about the game? “ Daiki continued, instigating with a mask of seriousness , teasing them like they were dogs. In Teiko, with Kise, he was not so aggressive. "Two for five, as a warm-up. I'm sure you'll find three more players if you need help.”

 “Aren’t you too self-confident?” judging from the jagged chin, Nedji was ready to rush to Aomine right at the moment. Daiki had a talent to drive people to the berserk mode. All the former members of Teiko had, for that matter.

 “I said two for five, not one for five. For recent years, I do fucking great with my self-conception .

"Haven’t noticed this yet," Kuroko squinted at the hand holding his shoulder.

“Do not worry,” Yarite spat, not even catching the hint. “We will cure you from this”.

“Yeah… You better do not lose the ball until you reach the court,” Aomine snorted, with a familiar evil gaiety in his voice, and Tatsuya thought that he would like to know what made Daiki rush at people so stupidly and recklessly, unlike himself...

... and lay his paw on Kuroko.

  “Aomine-kun ...” Tetsuya sighed, disgustedly reminding himself of some infantile anime heroines, and, having pulled himself together, struck his finger under the Daiki’s ribs. “I asked not to lean on me.”

Daiki grimaced and shied away.

 “Ugh, fuck, I was doing it out of love actually!” the words drowned in the united cackling, which broke off just after Tetsuya had a look at Yarite. These people - not bad and not good, but too insincere, - began to irritate him. In their thirst for sensations they turned basketball into a fight, and they appreciated the victory only for money.

“And you ... Please, gather your team,” Kuroko ordered, and his eternal discreet politeness dissolved in an unusual, frightening tone. Few would expect to hear from Kuroko something like that.

In response, Yarite raised his hand with a protruding middle finger; but before anyone noticed, the ball that he was beating on the move turned out to be in Aomine's hands.

Just in a moment. Perfect, as always.

 “Let's go, Tetsu.” Daiki straightened his shoulders, and it seemed that only with this one movement he shook off his laziness and oscitance, and the dazzling sunny heat that was flowing from the west covered his figure, as many times before, blinding Kuroko's eyes. "We'll show the bastards how to play."

The same had already happened. A long time ago. And it was gone.

Maybe he was expecting a smile or a nod of agreement, or what else there was that Too players shouted to each other, but instead of following, Tetsuya grabbed Aomine by the sleeve of his T-shirt and drew him closer.

 “Did it ever come to your mind that I could disagree?” he asked gloomily, not knowing what he expected to hear in return. Probably somewhere in the depth of his soul, he was afraid that for Aomine nothing had changed - as if Kuroko did not go anywhere, did not play with anyone else, that he remained in a stupid fifteen, a naive, strong-willed shade, a shadow, always giving a pass only to him.

Maybe it was better that Daiki’s face, as if laid-back, could not be read.

“But you have agreed?” he said, not trying to pull away, enduring the tight T-shirt collar cutting into the neck of.

“ Yes,”- Kuroko nodded. “I have  agreed.”

“So, everything is fucking good.”

Without any reason, Tetsuya understood Daiki - his actions, motives and goals - only when they played basketball.

The audience had already gathered around the court, those who would mock, hoot and liked waving hands. Someone would encourage Daiki, but would not dare at least to touch his shoulder. Kuroko sat down on the asphalt to change his shoes, and Aomine stopped behind him, knocking the ball. Nedji, who was standing prominently at the opposite ring, was surrounded by four players, the same ones, including the asthmatic – Burokku - who had been suffocating on a memorable night, and judging by their faces, they were preparing at least for hand-to-hand combat.

 “How do you think, has someone bet on us?” Kuroko asked, ruthlessly stuffing his jacket into his backpack. His hands were shaking slightly, and it seemed that the ground under his feet was turning into a swampy slime. Which would swallow him someday.

“Who gives a shit, “ Aomine snorted, glancing at his rivals. "We're playing for fun, Tetsu."

Kuroko zipped up the backpack zipper and smiled, preferring to remain silent. Long time ago he went far over his limit to hear these words; he, for that matter, always went far over his limit for the sake of basketball. Maybe that's why small smiling Aomine clung in him back then. Like a child clinging in a furry puppy.

“Take it,” said Daiki, and his palm sealed something to the Tetsuya’s chest. Transparent packaging, two soft parts.

“Wristwraps?” Kuroko wondered, looking up at his friend; the goddamn sun again struck in the face, and it was almost unfair to be blind at that moment.

“Just put it on,” Aomine grimaced, as if waving Satsuki away, as if nothing had happened. As if he did not know in advance that Tetsuya would come, and did not expect him.

"As you wish," thought Kuroko, biting his lip, and did not answer, went to the center of the court. The Nike elastic tightly wrapped around his wrists, filled the feeling of incompleteness, and Tetsuya - a small and ridicule, sinewy and resolute - again became the man able to change the course of the game in seconds.

Damn, they were playing together again!

Daiki’s pleasure in this opening could cost someone a great deal.

 “You are so serious,” Aomine threw the ball to the guy with a whistle and stood in front of Nedji. “Are you offended that I dragged Tetsu from you?”

“You seem to be a too insolent piece of shit,,” the other guy lazily held out. "No offense. We will smash your face into the court purely for preventive purposes.

Daiki looked at the enemy's command with a scornful glance.

 “So much ambitions. Go on, I like it.”

“Do you think the boy will help you?“ asked Yarite, pointing at Kuroko with disdain.

“If he likes, Tetsu will shove your head up your arse...” said Daiki, eloquently singling out words, and made the stance. "Now you concentrate and try not to make me bored."

"It will not be boring," Kuroko promised, it seems, to himself, and the invisible thorns of the thorn bush dug into his skin all in the same places. Tetsuya did not have the habit of deceiving himself, and, well, he did not try. He was standing on this damned court, under the scorching rays of the passing sun, and inside him another equally huge sun was burning his inner organs with anticipation and fear. Once again they played with Aomine side by side - what a ridiculous joke, after so many years - again bound hand and foot, the assembled details of the mechanism, and this thought alone besotted, and Kuroko wanted to scream, and Kuroko could run any marathon that Rico would come up with, three times, because there were no words capable of describing a whirlwind of thoughts and feelings that were spreading Tetsuya's calm soul to pieces.

Gods, he could had lived like that for ten more years, with Daiki in his own head and with other people around him, but one summer evening he just left the house, and the boring routine blown to pieces.

 “Go, kittens,” the folk judge chuckled and threw up the ball.

Now Kuroko and Aomine were going to play for five people. It's like in silly blockbuster movies, where two chines with swords bend the armed guard of the whole complex. Or was it another movie? It did not matter. Tetsuya knew that they would succeed, without errors, without hesitation, without embarrassment. Daiki simply jumped and hit the ball in his direction. He knew, too.

A rush of dry wind blew dust grains into the air, Kuroko hit the ball up and forward, and Aomine intercepted it before anyone had time to react. Footsteps hit the asphalt, and the echoing shudder of the ring sounded like a tocsin among the screams of the crowd. Daiki and Kagami had the same love for danks.

The enemy gather their thoughts and went on a counterattack. They, all five, jerked back, throwing the ball to each other, and did not even notice that Aomine wasn’t in a hurry to catch up with them. Neither they did notice Kuroko, however. Tetsuya allowed them to the center position, and after everything he went through the last three years, including the game against Murasikibara, it was ridiculously easy to take away the ball from them. Aomine flew to Kuroko, passed from the side like a hurricane, the chasing players dashed aside from him, like from a rabid dog, and Daiki tackled Kuroko's pass with only for him visible movement and ran to the ring.

It was like a dance, an idiotic, impetuous dance, and it didn’t matter if you turned your face away, closed your eyes, and it didn’t matter how many opponents would get in your way, you always knew where the second partner was. Tetsuya danced, realizing that every fucking idler and every fool on the court admired the beauty and purity of this dance just like Kuroko himself.

 “You are going to race me to death,” Kuroko laughed softly, resting his hands on his knees, sweat was dripping from him in streams, but even the goddamn heat could not stop him. Not when he was playing with Daiki.

“At least you die happy,” Aomine remarked reasonably, slamming Kuroko’s back covered with white linen.

“All right then,” Tetsuya agreed easily, looking stealthily at the players approaching them. "But first we'll bury them. I do not know about you but I want to completely smash these guys. So that they could feel defeat’s bitterness not for the money lost. So that next time they play for the sake of the game.”

“Just tell me "Bite".” Aomine threw his head back, sucking in the air through a wide grin, and from that moment the whole attack of the other team, which supposed to be a speedy onslaught, was doomed.

Tetsuya ran a hand over his face and went ahead as well. There were only two of them, two players, which should have been easy to follow, but running behind Aomine he would become an absolute shadow.

Within five minutes only, they smashed the opponents to the nines, and the spectators - this huge mass blinded by the sunset – was raving around and roaring, and deep inside Kuroko was roaring with them, even when Daiki ran into guard of four people. But aggressive attitude did not work with him, it was like using bullets against bullets;  Daiki was able to bypass this living wall, it would not be boring at all, but Aomine still remembered what it was like - to play a duet. Giving Yarite and other his frenzied smile, he threw the ball over their heads, and Tetsuya had no choice but to accept this pass.

“What are you gonna do, kid?” wheezed Nedji, growing as if right from under the ground, and in his eyes a dangerous coal of extinct confidence was smoldering.

“I’m gonna shot,” replied Kuroko, and the ball hit the ring  as if having flown through Nedji.

Tetsuya turned and ran before the ball touched the ground. So he and the ball fell on the asphalt at the same time. The rubber began to rattle, the black rough surface ripped Kuroko's hand down to the elbow, and if not for the long pants, he would have hit his knees. A whistle and screams started rushing over the site - a reaction to the first blood.

 “This is not a school parquet for you, kid,” Burokka mumbled, shrugging his shoulders, not even realizing that he wasn’t being listened to or seen.

Staggering, Kuroko got up on his feet, the shirt on one side was stained with a ichor-mingled sweat, and his lips were squeezed into a pale line. Standing half-turned, allowing the other team to pass by, Aomine caught his glance. Nodded. Turned his back.

The next throw Daiki made basing his knee on someone's chest. And it wasn’t slightly the toughest his way to conduct dribbling – there was a reason he was called a power forward.

He didn't even lamed his rivals - they lamed themselves against him.

Thirty seconds after, Nedji and his team no longer had any doubt that they were playing against the devil - terrible, fast and ruthless devil. A minute later a group of random volunteers, accompanied with the disapproving rumble of the crowd, had to drag them - sober and stunned - off the basketball court. Burokku was choking again, this time because of the broken by the ball nose, but it was hardly a pity.

Kuroko was always for a fair game, Aomine was as well, but when at Rome, live as the romans live, isn’t it?

"What are you doing?" Tetsuya was asking himself, exposing his face to the wind, but all the reproaches that he could tell to himself and to Daiki broke against a wide, white-toothed smile. Aomine was smiling, and Kuroko, seeing this, wanted to hug the whole world.

Yet he himself was not enough for the whole world, so he along with Daiki shook hands with Nedji's guys - with restraint, almost apologizing, but not hiding his eyes - and trailed towards his backpack. This day he was supposed to read the twentieth chapter for history classes, and instead, probably, he lit more than fifty hearts, showing how one could play basketball.

  “This great feeling when your legs fall off,” Aomine exhaled through his teeth, leaning against the mesh next to Kuroko.

“Are you gloating?” The earth was still hot, the body was aching, and Tetsuya found the strength to open only one his eye. “ It's like I was rinsed in a washing machine”.

Daiki stretched out his limbs amazedly and lay down on his back, like a soft cat; Midorima would found this habit infuriating, and Momoi always saw something fascinating in it, as if for his face turned to the sky Aomine could be forgiven for everything. Kuroko rarely paid attention to these trifles. Until they started to  appear in his dreams.

 “I feel guilty,” Daiki said thoughtfully.

“No, you don’t,” Kuroko chuckled, bringing a bottle to his mouth. Court behind his back tore the evening with a hubbub, the ball was back in the game, the washing machine was working. "You have too pleased face to believe this."

“I can not help myself,” answered Daiki, stretching out his words, rolling down to his usual lazy manner of speech. “I notice you, somehow, do not rush with condemnations.”

“Do I do this so often?”

“Not out loud, but occasionally I feel how my head burns with you righteous anger.”

 “For now, even the oxidation process in my body seems to go with some difficulties, and you're talking about burning with a glance,” Kuroko smiled and inclined his head to one side so he could actually see Daiki. "Besides, I really think you were great. As you always are. All those guys are obsessed with fighting rather than basketball. Obsessed with self-assertion. All these tournaments and bets ... In any case, condemning you, I would have to condemn myself. And for what? There are no rules here.”

Aomine opened his eyes and looked at Tetsuya, strangely, unreadable.

“Yes,” he said. “There are no rules”.

For a moment – short, bright, filled like lungs torn with air - Kuroko wanted to bend down and cuddle his forehead against Aomine's forehead. Touch it and break something that had always been between them, feel it. But such touches were not a thing that friends do, so Tetsuya simply looked away, stifling that spark in himself, one of many others.

It's funny that if Kuroko would like to ask, then no one would say that he and Aomine were _friends_. This word was pale, wrong, it was not enough, and even good old Akashi, with his all-seeing eyes, would not choose any word for their relationship . Such thing, it didn’t have a definition.

The right thing was to tell Aomine about everything, back then in Teiko, but Tetsuya did not know how to, so he cowardly remained silent. He would stifle himself and say nothing, preferring not to notice that Daiki's close presence was like LSD – it caused not physical but psychological addiction and need. It's not the body that breaks, you break.

 “Aomine-kun,” Kuroko called, looking in the distance, through the channel, “why are you here?”

“You mean this farce, which they call street basketball?”

“Yes.”

“For the same reason as you, I guess. I need this. If I do not play, I will go mad. Literally. And these guys, even though they do not understand a damn thing in the subtleties of basketball, they do not give up.”

 Tetsuya smiled sadly, with his lips only, and again reached for the bottle of water.

“You do not think that we are the same, right?”

“What do you mean?” Daiki rolled over to his side, smudging shamelessly his T-shirt, and propped his head in his hand.

“I’m talking about our reasons. You were born for basketball, you, so to speak, have no choice. You would have turned to this road anyway. And I started to follow it out of pure persistence, because this is the only thing I want to do, what I'm aiming at, despite the fact that my height in encyclopedias is not even indicated as minimal.” Tatsuya thoughtlessly ran his finger along the bottle neck. “You are born for this game. And I'm going against the tide.”

Kuroko's voice was colorless, he wasn’t complaining, wasn’t flaunting his problems, he did not slide into the egotism which was so typical for people, but simply voicing the facts, in some stupid, inexplicable  attempt to convey to Daiki things that Kuroko knew all along.

 But everyone has their own truth, despite the fact that the truth, in its essence, is only one.

  “It does not matter, Tetsu,” said Daiki. “In any case we go in the same direction. We constantly converge at the same points of the universe ...” He paused, looking away, and suddenly grinned, his long strong fingers traced five strips on the ground. “Wasn’t it too pathetic?”

“A little,” Kuroko answered readily, and his attempt to take a sip of water came to a spattered face and shirt.

“And who of us is scoffing,” Aomine laughed, pouring water on his hair.

 Startled, Kuroko looked like a wet, offended cat.

  “Crew you,” he was spiting out, exposing his hands, sprinkling water in response and laughing too. Laughing was the easiest thing, it was easier than thinking about someone's motives, his own fixations and darkness in Daiki's eyes. This way it seemed that they were back in high school, and everything was still ahead.

People are connected by threads, one after another, from small ones – sewing threads, - to the threads crocheted in ropes that keep you close to someone, like ship hooks. It seemed that for Kuroko and Aomine this rope was basketball - one endlessly strong, but still bust once thread. The fibers disintegrated, thinned and torn.

But the ships never parted.

Hooks - a whole chain - crashed into the ship sides, neither you can yank nor trim them.

“We have to stand up,” Aomine decided, lazily stretching out his words, although not changing his posture; he was laying on his side, wet and tired.

“You  will be first,” drops of water was unpleasantly sliding down Kuroko’s neck, was glinting on the eyelashes; Kuroko was thinking about how his hair would be dirty in the dust, and how beautiful Daiki's face was through these twinkling water on the lash of the eyelashes.

“I'm always the first ... Let’s count to "three"?”

“One.”

“Two.”

“Three.”

“My fucking legs ...”

 Aomine made a grimace of pain and stretched out, full-length, beautifully in his own way. Tetsuya, hiding the childish smile, began to shake off the dust from his own trousers. The sunlight, having melted in gold, was flowing down the horizon, little by little grabbing the brightness of the day's colors, and as if trying to complete something, softly and unobtrusively, but with unshakable tenacity.

Throwing the backpack on his shoulder, Kuroko was looking at this sunset and preparing himself for the fact that in a moment he and Aomine would drift apart in different directions, as it had already happened many times, and nothing could be done about it. Kuroko would languish, suffer from heat and prepare for exams, Aomine would also do something - exist, flit in the crowd, get in Kuroko’s dreams more often. But all this would be after sunset, after the point. It seems that life is a bank that does not give a deferment, that is why the happiness taken on credit cause fabulous interest for the credit granted.

Well, the happiness stated turned out to be quite different from what Kuroko had imagined. Illogical, inexplicable, morbidly obscure it was, like the darkness in Aomine's eyes. Appeared in no time, pierced with thoughts - darkness.

Perhaps, the darkness was to blame that everything went wrong. Went wrong one more time.

 “Hey,” called Daiki, turning to the channel, breaking expectation. “Tell me, do you believe in fate, Tetsu?”

Kuroko raised his eyebrows in surprise, though Aomine turned his back to him and could not see it.

“Rather… no.” he answered. Tetsuya, like the Beatles, believed in himself.

Daiki was silent for a moment.

“Neither do I,” said he as if decided something and turned around. “Would you go shopping with me, to buy some grub for my old man?”

Twenty minutes after, Kuroko and Aomine was walking between the rows of shelves, rolling in front of them a children's food cart of amusing green color, and the white blinding lamps of the department, as if mocking, was marking out hundreds of details of their battered, untidy appearance.

 “Guksu or ramen?”  Kuroko squatted in front of the shelf stuffed with instant noodles.

“Take both,” muttered Aomine, and the whole variety of the packages went to the cart. His movements were light and sharp, in Tetsuya's opinion - all three points score. Professional deformation it might be.

“Is your father still in love with tanet mono?” Kuroko asked, pointing upstairs, and Daiki lazily stretched over his head, even without touching, took out another pack.

“Does he have a choice? My cooking skills are still at the minimum.”

“You know nothing about the minimum,” thought Tetsuya, remembering Rico and her rice cooked with pills.

“I tried udon that you cooked once. It was delicious.”

“You left two-thirds of the plate,” Aomine snorted, throwing makizushis into the basket. “Cats eat more.”

“I apologized.”

“It would be strange if you didn't... I still want to ask, why are you in school uniform?”

“I'm preparing for the entrance exams,” Kuroko sighed and pushed up the slid sleeve. “I'm beginning to suspect that I'll fail.”

Aomine turned around, raising his eyebrows in a joky surprise.

“Because of the basketball? Not the biggest sacrifice you’ve done.”

A small cart replenished: frozen fish, vegetables and canned food were added to the noodle boxes; Aomine walked between the shelves more confidently than some consultants, and it seemed that he had very little concern about what exactly he was taking. Apparently, the former scorer of Teiko was competent only in sneakers question. Tetsuya sighed bitterly, looked at the basket and with an invisible hand periodically snort some food returning it to the shelves. Daiki did notice or pretended to not notice; but his hands, infinitely long, strong, dark as usual, repeatedly touched Kuroko - wrists, shoulders, neck and cheeks - when Aomine dragged on another bottle of imported gherkins. Tetsuya rarely run into people, more and more often they would run into him, if he did not manage to dodge, but this evening he felt incredibly slow and spoiler, getting under the feet. Though not because Daiki touched him but because Kuroko knew that it wasn’t accidentally.

Tetsuya did not have the Emperor eyes, but he always was able to look closely.

“Does your dog need food?” asked Aomine, nodding toward the bags with dog food placed on the floor.

Kuroko preferred not to wonder why Daiki would remember that he had a dog.

“No. Number Two lives with Rico.”

“A flat trainer?” Daiki pushed the cart to the counter.

 “Mmm, yeah ... But do not say that with her around. Otherwise, I will be forced to cause you serious physical harm. Actually, I wanted to leave the dog to Kagami, but the idea did not arouse his enthusiasm. Taiga’s enthusiasm, I mean.” Kuroko began to put products on the conveyor. “Besides, if Rico has decided something it's difficult to argue with her.”

“She took the dog instead of the cups,” Aomine summed up, grinning.

“Satsuki used to rejoice the victories more than all of us,” said Kuroko. “And she took you instead of the cups. So we just got off easily.”

The computer pined, the cashier put food in prepared packages, Daiki stood with his hands in his shorts pockets and looked at the monitor with an unseeing gaze.

 “Would you rather give her the cups?” He asked, as if addressing not to Tetsuya at all. And Kuroko almost specified "to whom - her?" but said different words aloud.

He funked.

“What do you mean?”

Aomine waved his hand.

“Forget it.”

 If Tetsuya could, he would have done so.

 

They went out dragging a package in their hands - paying off, Daiki suddenly shed an ice-cream bucket from the conveyor belt and slipped it to Tetsuya; under other circumstances he could have knocked the spirit out of him but this time he only stuck the package, resolutely but cautiously, and warned that he would not accept any objections. If they were children, it would surely look cute, two big-eyed pure kids, the city cooling down in the twilight and a bucket of ice cream, but they were no longer the ones who had met at the Teiko gym. They had other eyes - serious, attentive, keeping people out, - other thoughts, considerably darker and deeper, and through the time Aomine's back became straighter and wider than Tetsuya remembered.

How does it happen that years go by and you cling to the same all person?

“Aomin-kun, I think we are going in the wrong direction.” Kuroko noticed on the tenth minute of their strange wanderings through the Tokyo streets.

“Do you know the way well?” Aomine was mocking not hiding it. “Don’t have kittens, I have decided that I will escort you to the bus stop. Otherwise if only I turn my head away, and all sorts of scumbags are recruiting you for dubious tournaments on which you're wasting away  like the only pony in a shitty circus. I never know, maybe I leave you right hear and tomorrow you will be yakuza already.”

“You are obviously exaggerating,” Tetsuya threw a condemning glance at his friend, but then he thought about the thing. “I now came up with the image of Akashi with a gun.”

Aomine grimaced, and the cellophane rustled protests in his hand.

“Do not tell such horrors at night.”

“You're right, I got excited,” Kuroko agreed, and after one-second pause they started to laugh.”

The gray pavement ran as smooth and loyal path under their feet, and leafage of the trees shuttered in fences whispered quietly; Tetsuya was making no attempt to tuck the shirt into his pants - not his style at all - and tried to persuade Daiki to find plastic spoons somewhere because the ice cream had probably begun to melt. Aomine smiled, seldom and softly, as if he had forgotten how to do it long ago and now it was happening - by accident; he rumpled his neck with his free hand and explained why daikon was better to cook on the low heat. All this was strange and so familiar that it even hurt, but Tetsuya would surely say "thank you" if there was anyone to say it to.

Whether Aomine was going to come to those courts again Kuroko never asked. He excused himself by not finding the right moment, but, actually, he simply got scared. And he did not look Daiki in the face neither when the buss came nor when he went up the stairs. Not when Aomine was waving to  him lazily.

Kuroko's heart, along with the blood, was pumping something else in his body, something that was  breaking him and making him unhappy and happy at the same time, and he did not know what to do or how to act and whether it was possible to get rid of the impurity. But not only his blood was poisoned - Tetsuya felt - and this was only worse.

When the bus started, quickly picking up the speed, and Kuroko saw his own reflection against the background of flashing lights behind the glass, it seemed to him that this was the most wrong deed he had done in his life.

Even in the contest of these sweltering summer days.

 

<3>

 

Dark blue and gray tones paved the empty apartment - without the switch click this place remained a faded, quiet, doomed-pacified image of itself. The unsorted packets rose on the table in a strange acute-angled pile, sadly dangling the thinned hands, and the hypnotic rhythm of water dripping from the tap spread throughout the kitchen. Aomine lay on the floor, throwing his feet on the cabinet door, perpendicular to the floor, and the phone screen illuminated his face with a deathly pale shade.

 “You call every fucking Wednesday,” Aomine gazed boredly at the ceiling. “What for?”

 At the other end, there was a sigh full of sorrow and tears unwept. And there was a splash of water as well.

“Because you are scheduled for Wednesdays. On Thursdays I call Muracchi, and Midorimacchi is on Saturdays. And there is Akashicchi on Tuesdays but he rarely picks up. They say he started a family business. I hope he did not kill his parents before that.”

“I have a thought sometimes, Kise, that you are fucked.”

“I have it too. Sometimes. But let's not immerse ourselves into the depths of psychoanalysis.”

There was another splash of water - it seems that Ryota was taking a bath - but Daiki caught himself on a thought that he absolutely did not care. Three years in one locker room, sometimes they used to plan an attack strategy right in the shower. If they would even burdened themselves with such a thing.

The tap used to leak there as well. The water would fly two meters to the floor, and drops would dash against the tile, resounding the shower room with this unique resonant echo. In ten minutes, if you were alone, it began to seem that it was something inside of you that was falling and breaking into the shards of molecular linkages. Tingle and emptiness would remain.

Sometimes you need this - to look into the emptiness within yourself and die.

The tap was dripping, the neighbors’ washing machine was buzzing somewhere near. Inly Daiki was far away: on a sandlot licked with wind, where dust,  like powder, would stain his sneakers; in the Teiko gym, in the crowd of first-year students; at the stadium, where the crowd was applauding - for the first time - not to him. How would know, he already was eighteen years, was one of the most famous basketball players in the country but his memories were all black with wearies.

Voice of Kise - something otherworldly, too lively and sunny - brought him out of this half-dream.

 “Momoi-san told me,” Ryota shared, conspiratorial soughing with the bath foam. “About your achievements. I did not expect, honestly. Not that I don’t believe in you, but ...”

Aomine stiffened, and in the corners of his eyes thin, unusual wrinkles lay like sharp shadows. The world persistently made him look older and older.

“Has she called everyone with this news?”

“ No,” Kise smiled. “She let it out while we were shopping. Were choosing  her a dress for the session.

“How far you've fallen.”

“Shut up, Daicchi, or I'll hound her on you. It would take me just to cancel a call for her on Mondays.

 ”Oh, how spooky, you’ve  fucking scared me, found a control button. You can be proud of yourself,” several times a week Daiki would throw the things that Momoi called home-made food. He had been doing  this for the last five years, and , well, Satsuki never seemed anybody more to him than an annoying younger sister. Even the letter "F" on her brassiere could not displace the image of a snotty girl, digging in the sandbox.

 “You are absolutely not worthy of this woman,” said Kise notably.

“I told her so, but she would not listen.”

“Well, I suppose you're better than some other bastard like you.”

“Some bastard?” Aomine smiled and tiredly palmed his face with his free hand. “It may be so.”

 Legs had numbed considerably, and Daiki knew that if he had got up now, he would have felt dizzy. He breathed deeply and smoothly in the gaps of rare phrases, as in a trance, and imagined that he was lying on the ceiling, his overgrown hair hanging down. If you look at the world differently, will it change?

The water continued to drip, and everything inside of Aomine was sphacelating slowly, was dying, petrifying and ceasing to feel. Aomine was able to throw a ball into the basket from any position, focusing on a hit-or-miss look and intuition, from his own back or from under someone's hand, but when it came to some soul-related fuck he was unable to figure it out by himself. He was confused, angry, confused even more, and he sank, sank, sank ...

 “Is your father still on a business trip?” asked Kise.

“ Yes,” Aomine turned his gaze to the bag above his head. “Two weeks in the mountains, a new project. Someday the Japanese will nestle skyscrapers in the trees.”

“Should I inform Satsuki-san that you are starving?”

“You dare and I'll bury you under the gym’s parquet.”

“Understood,” Kise’s laughter was soft, jingly, this guy was the very charm even without a public.

 An ideal doll, changing her roles. An obstinate doll that commanded respect. He had been broke only by Kuroko - who made him weep, smudging  snivels. Twice.

 “Speak,” sighed Aomine, when the pause, so meaningful as if in movies, began to push his limits. “Your chatter goes away further and further from the true purpose of the call and  tire me out like hell. My hand is already numb.”

 “Take the phone with another,” Kise suggested, this time not friendly at all, and gods only kept Daiki from hanging up. Or from ripping the phone apart on the floor. Methodically and with a great pleasure. “And why do you even take it that I'm calling not out of a big love?”

Daiki was silent. Somewhere on the other side of the city, Kise swung his wet hands, spraying water around.

“Okay, let it be. There was an intention. But I am acting for the best of reasons!” the statement sounded convincing, but Aomine left it unanswered, and Ryota went to the rock bottom quickly. “You know, I'm happy for you. Really. Despite all the shit that was before, you keep growing. You aspire to. But ... I do not want to potch in, but are you ready for consequences, Daiki?”

Aomine closed his eyes and frowned. Preparing for something in advance had never been his style.

“I prefer to deal with any consequences right on the spot.”

“We are talking about the opposite time zone and a piece of land located across the ocean. Assimilation in the Western world isn’t something with which your granted by gods talent will help you.”

You're afraid of completely wrong things, Ryota... Daiki's lips curved in a bitter grin.

“Stop worrying, Kise,” he answered calmly. “Leave it to Momoi.”

The phonedynamic transmitted only sounds, different, muffled, distorted by the channel traveled, but even so Daiki easily imagined Ryota’s long, searching look aiming at him. When you really know a person, they even speak with their distinctive intonations in your own head.

“You know, Aominecchi,” said Kise emotionally, “You are a rare billy-goat.”

“Because I was not touched by your care? Forgive me...”

“ No, because you constantly slag off people who are trying to help you.”

Daiki almost felt that he, just like that, with the cellphone in his hand, crumpled somewhere deep down; through the rain and uproarious stream of the canal near the Teiko High School. The last water drop falling into the sink split and hit the ears with a dead metal blow.

Aomine stood up from the floor and went to turn on the kettle.

“Why do you think that I need help?” A switch clicked, a red button on the kettle lighted up red.

“There are hundreds of universities in Japan, Aomine. To hook you they would gnash each other's throats, run after  you and crawl at your feet. You could choose anything. Stab your finger in the rating, after all. But you're fleeing on the mainland. Far, far away. And do you know what that looks like? As if you were running away," Kise said, in syllables. "You ask me, you really need help."

Quickly, reminding the roar of an approaching car, the buzz of the electric kettle was rising. The sound seemed to be an echo, an unreal thing. Daiki looked at the red button and thought what Ryota would say, this kind, right guy, if he knew a little more. Only it was of no use for Kise to know what it was like to die of hypoxia and to not breathe; what it was like when your air was someone alive.

 “Aren’t you afraid to do worse?” drawled Daiki, squinting at the faint red light.

“This, my friend, the bottom,” said Kise firmly. “There is no any worse.”

If only they were standing in front of each other, talking in person, Aomine would not be able to help knocking out all Kise’s even white teeth. He had already gone through the shit like this, long ago at high school, help and support turned out to be the most useless of what people could give you, and Daiki would freak out every time when someone so self-confidently tried to nose into his Hell.

 “This dialogue is turning out to be unfuckingbelievably funny, Kise,” The steam rising from the teapot was burning Daiki's open palm. “Do you know why? You, motherfucker, have no fucking idea even about the banal "bad." It's always sunny in your head, always awesome. You say “the bottom" although you have never seen situations to be named so. What do you know about life in general, except that we all can lose one day? You say that I'm running, but do you give a fuck, Kise?” Daiki's intonations, sticky, low, was lashing like whips. “Do not you dare judge me or size me up until you wake up one day with the feeling that your insides have been twisted into mincemeat. And leave your fucking help to yourself.”

There should had been beeps. Short, hysterical, almost like affront. But the switch of the kettle clicked, Aomine pressed the phone with his shoulder, took out his mug; hot water bathed a tea bag, but the dump silence on the other side lasted and lasted. Until Kise asked:

 “Did you shout at Kuroko the same way back then?”

Hot water spilled on the table.

Aomine clenched his teeth and slowly put the kettle back in place, the shadow-wrinkles trenched deeper into his skin.

Kise always annoyed him. From the very beginning, as soon as he had entered the gym and begun to hover over Tetsu, like an intrusive stupid dog. Kise loved basketball as much as the rest of them, perhaps even more because he was good  not only in it; Kise was an idealist to the core; he violated constantly the distance, was pathologically blind to simple things and worried about trifles. He was like a reflection from a crooked mirror and he resembled Momoi. And just like her, Ryota was able to pull the most vile things out of people and hang out in front of your nose.

How could Daiki forget about it.

“You know,“ Ryota sighed. “The water has almost cooled down, but I still do not understand what your head is stuffed with.”

Not even looking at the infused tea, Aomine turned and tiredly, heavily settled to the floor, leaned his back against the cupboard. The major part of human life goes in the struggle not with the outside world but with oneself, and so it turns out that opponents are absolutely equal in this massacre. But for some reason you - the one who is always right – lose the strength faster.

Daiki wasn’t sure that he and Ryota were talking about the same thing, that behind all the words, hints and phrases the same meaning was hid. There was the same shit going with people - they thought one thing, said the second, and others heard the third, understanding the fourth. Language - this privilege of humanity – didn’t not provide understanding at all if you wanted to impart something really deep and complex, something that for you went only in the word "darkness".

Aomine had rules. Not from the very beginning, of course, - you do not think about something like that, when you're thirteen, but time goes by, and one day you start to fear yourself. The heart of a teenager is not large enough for receiving all this fear, so the rules would appeare on their own, like a protective mechanism, like a block. Do not miss or raise Kuroko in your arms after the game, do not touch for more than ten seconds, do not look too closely, do not show that you always know where he is, watching the sound of his steps, do not demand to pass only to yourself, do not breathe a due, do not incline to the bend of his neck, inhaling the smell, do not to draw him by his clothes every time Tetsu turns to be a meter away, do not bring Kise and Kagami low, do not come to the every game, do not call, do not come about at his place, do not take your hands out of your pockets ... And hundreds and hundreds more  "do not", that had accumulated over the years, stowing into a thick wall of shattered glass, which Aomine had been building up to keep himself within the borders, to calmly look into the eyes and not try to press into a wall, a locker, into boards of a court - it didn’t matter - and didn’t check what would happen if the whole wall had collapsed, and Kuroko would understand that for Daiki it wasn’t enough to be fucking light, friend, to be that guy who hid his hands in pockets and looked from the tribune or whatever. That Daiki himself didn’t not know how it happened, but he loved, like an idiot, loved Tetsu, wanted him, in every meaning, perverted and possessive, and knew that according to all laws and beyond, Tetsuya was his, his own like an arm or a leg. Daiki didn’t give a fuck if it meant that he was mentally broken, that something was wrong with him only because a vacuum had deduced once between the pieces of meat that provided his vital activity, and the only one with whom it could be filled Kuroko was.

Kise said that Aomine was fleeing and he was completely right. It was a ponderate, self-destructive setback. Still, Daiki, when he was a boy, learned the lessons of courtesy and generally accepted morality norms, but actually he felt indifferent both about morality and public reprobation. Anyone who would call him a fagot would meet his knuckles with their teeth. If Aomine thought of kissing Kuroko in public – as he often wanted - he would have it done. None of the external factors could influence him somehow, not after Aomine had fully realized what he wanted. He was fleeing from himself. Fear was still there. Aomine was afraid of what would have happen if the wall of glass had collapsed and, cutting, shredding and biting, had buried beneath itself their with Kuroko friendship and trust and reliable "do not", and them themselves.

Aomine did not know what would happen next. Therefore, he was silent.

In fact, it is possible to live with emptiness inside. Aomine did well, a whole year; the vacuum would expand, absorb him, turning into nothing, but Daiki lived, and if someone asked, then everything was good with him. Love - the ugly, idiotic word – is a rare bitch. It is possible to undergo it from a distance - it does not hurt, does not weight down, you are calm like Buddha, and no surprises are ahead. Nevertheless when Daiki saw Kuroko again - on the court, in another team, among the crowd - and came closer, it was crumpling and destroying him, and the vacuum was breaking the ribs inward.

It was safer to escape. There in his bedroom, at the bottom of an empty suitcase, was a crumpled letter, in which the soulless black letters of the Latin alphabet informed that Aomine Daiki was accepted to a college in California on the basis of a sports scholarship. Far away, very safe.

Several days in a row this fucking letter created the illusion of alienation, as if Daiki already was out of Tokyo, as if the vacuum had shrunk to the size of a dot and lay up next to the left lung. Aomine wasn't a professional in ostrichism, but it seemed to him that the blows of a basketball might knock out all the thoughts from his head, at least so that he could reach a runway at the airport.

"It's quite possible to live with this," thought Aomine, hammering another dunk and landing on the asphalt . He thought  about  letting everything to remain as it was. He relaxed. And then - as if the gods were laughing at him – he saw Kuroko's face in the whitened with lanterns night. And everything went fucked up.

For the last few days, Daiki had been sweeping away those "do not" one by one, and goafs of the glass could not stop him. He wanted them to collapse. He was tired of keeping himself under. Even if it meant to break everything and then run to the other end of the world.

Kise did not understand what his head was stuffed with. Neither did Daiki. He only had the feeling that something had grabbed him, hooking its fingers over his ribs, and pulling him with terrible force.

 “Have you ever had such a thing… that you do absolutely wrong things and feel as if you do the right thing?” Aomine said, looking indifferently at the unsorted package of food. “And vice versa – you do everything as it should be done but you understand that it is a complete bullshit.”

Ryota, who apparently had thought deeply about the question, answered not right away.

“No,” the doubt in his voice was of a kind that a doctor would get not having a fucking idea about the kind of rash a patient has on the back. "But, taking into account everything I know, and everything you said to me, I have to ask you something."

“Go ahead.”

“You saw Kurokocchi recently, didn’t you?”

Aomine preferred to remain silent. He was plucking up to sort out the products which were of no use to anyone.

“For Christ's sake, Daiki,” said Kise emotionally and, judging by the splash of water, he starkly got out of the bath. Aomine hoped that Kise was speeding not to visit him. "Kami-sama, I do not even want to think about it ... I mean, it's always been obvious, but ... Aomine. You can not.”

“What is it exactly I can’t?”

“You know better.”

“Well, I see you yourself don’t know it clearly.”

“I guess,” it seemed, Ryota was in a panic. In a way, it was funny. "Have you thought about consequences? Ugh, what I'm talking about, of course I didn’t . You live the same way you play. You rush flat-out, throwing roughly and do not look back.”

Daiki smiled and rose to take the tea mug. Kise was right once more: he got fucking tired of thinking about consequences and of looking back too.

“That's what I'll tell you. No matter to what end it would lead. If something happens to Kurokocchi - anything - there are at least fifty people in Japan who will tear you apart for him," Kise warned, detaching the words. "Buy your ticket in advance, Daiki."

“Surely I will,” Aomine answered, taking a sip of the cooled tea. “An open return airline ticket. Go warm yourself, Kise, or you'll catch a cold.”

Daiki pressed off the call, and the kitchen merged in the darkness. Roar of cars flying down below came from the half-opened window, interrupting the echo of the ragged talk.

It's strange that Kise actually would call him. He didn’t seem to be a person suffering from loneliness.

For a moment, Daiki really thought about stopping. The perfidious thought even being not more than a doubt, poisoned him with all the things that were so common for people going backward. But in Daiki’s case there was no lesser evil, as well as there was no easy choice, and this awkward, meaningless ray-thought was swept away from his consciousness by the mobile phone trill. Aomine reached for his pocket, took out the cell phone and rolled back the display. The mobile operator offered him a new tariff.

Daiki looked blankly at the black symbols. He was hesitating. Picking up words. Then he сlicked in the message box, сhose the addressee.

There wasn’t any difference now - one "do not" less, one "do not" more.

 

At five minutes to ten Tetsuya received the message: "Take a hot bath so that your muscles do not sore. Good night".

 

<4>

 

A person does not need much to live: some water, some food and a safe place for sleep. The rest of problems, showing ridiculous to tears propensity for repetition,  people vamp up by themselves.

Hot summer dragged unusually slowly along the monotonous calendarian days, or whether it was Kuroko who stuck in it, loaded with all the stuff that the adult life could offer a beginner, even if he had just stepped in; but from the middle of August fleetingness of the season showed itself to the full. Summer slipped out like a seagull rushing towards the waves, the numbers would change one after another, and Tetsuya found himself being not capable of counting them. He slept scantily and restlessly, and in his stifling heavy dreams, that would exhaust him and would not give him peace, he always was a part of something that he would lost irretrievably in the end. He would run not being able to find. And it was harder for him to wake up as the more distinctly there, in a dream, he felt the overwhelming love of this something. Awakening would extirpate it every time.

Almost for a week Kuroko would hardly eat, drink some water, get on his bus. Every day he played an amusing game with a clock: he tried to hold out as long as possible before breaking to the used up basketball court at the canal. He often lost, the clock hand would secretly laugh at him.

He had almost grown into this thrilling feeling: to hurry somewhere, to strive and feel happy – feel happy for the first few moments until something strange there began to tear him from the inside. He suffered, suffered and fled to the court again, because he couldn’t not to run. Whatever it was, it devoured him lock, stock and barrel.

 “I think I'm becoming addicted to this,” Tetsuya said on Wednesday sitting by the court; he was worried and puzzled, but outwardly as unperturbed as always.

Aomine, sitting next to him, asked:

“Have you ever heard the phrase: "Find what you love and let it kill you"?”

“It seems, I have heard,” concentrated, Tetsuya was flicking his finger on the ball lines. "Wasn’t it Hemingway who said that?"

“Hardly it was him. I remember that it was some American litterateur.

“If I'm not mistaken, he shot himself?”

“Yes,” Aomine bit his lower lip. "If it was Hemingway, then it's a bad advice."

He did not show up on the court neither on Thursday nor on Friday.

Only when he saw the empty court filled with people, Tetsuya realized that the feeling he had been undergoing was similar to the feeling of the every morning of the last week - an irreparable loss and a childish umbrage.

Disappointment and unreasonable hopes.

Hopes for what?

Kuroko did not come on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

He thought he would last longer. That he would start sleeping normally - he even tried to drink milk before going to bed. But the clock hand won again.

 

<5>

 

A powerful, evil wind, like a roaring grice, hurtled through the streets of Tokyo and flew down toward the cannels  in a sobering blasts only to boost with a shriek over the water. Under its pressure trees sloped helplessly to the ground, and the dust swept wall-like along the roads . From behind the horizon, urged by this wind, blue-black clouds was approaching the city. They, like cotton wool soaked in ink, were rolling  in the sky in ragged, dense pieces, and their gray interior blazed with blurry edges every time the sun's gleams pierced through the impenetrable cloth.

People presaged the storm from the very morning, and Kuroko knew that no one would come to the site this day; this annoying thought had been grinding him hour by hour, when he looked out the window, when he made a step on the road leading along the houses. There could not be anyone on the court where Tetsuya was drawn with all the tenacity of the possessed mind, not even Daiki.

This thought bedeviled him but Tetsuya diligently fought against it. He was a real fighter, actually, in a weak body.

Kuroko should not have been there. He left the house for some milk. But Fate, like cancer, exists, even if you do not want to believe in it.

Aomine wassmoothly bouncing the ball against the asphalt in some sort of soothing, trance motion, and the wind - this storm outside of the body – was ruffling his hair and the tail of his shirt. Daiki was handsome. Of course, it was foolish of Kuroko to think about something like this, it was actually strange to admire someone, but for Tetsuya Aomine was a fire in the dark - you could watch forever. Daiki rounded the ball behind his back, changed hands, dribbled under his knee - so quickly that Kuroko could not see it - and casually shot into the basket. Kuroko did not remember how long ago he found himself capable to tell how the ball was thrown - with fun, with anger, with a will to win. This time Aomine was angry. It erupted through the movement of his wrist.

Tetsuya never said "hello", just stood behind him and watched while the storm squalls snatched the packet from his hands. It seemed ridiculous, childish to tell Aomine something like the things he was thinking about. Farewells and partings were not about them.

“So are you gonna remain silent?” Even the words were rent by the wind. Aomine picked up the ball under the ring and turned to Kuroko.

“I do not know how to ask,” he shrugged his shoulders awkwardly. Probably, it was from the very beginning that Daiki felt that Kuroko came; that Kuroko was uncomfortable in his own body.

“Good,” sighed Aomine, trying on to throw. “Do not ask. I will not know how to respond anyway.”

The ball rebounded off the backboard and fell into a metal ring. Tetsuya threw back his head and looked up. Sick, gray-blue clouds were eclipsing the sky, and sunlight made its way through as a rare blessing.

 “May I assume that you are angry with me?” Tetsuya said, hiding his hands in his pockets, almost like Daiki, but as if hiding every inch of himself.

Aomine - a walking mockery - turned to him again, incidentally.

 “What an egocentrism! I did not expect it from you, Tetsu,” he was joking, almost sincerely, but slaked quickly. Sometimes Kuroko was afraid that Aomine could as well simply burn out and die out before reaching the age of thirty. “No, if we have started talking about this. It's not about you. I've never been angry with you.”

 “You're lying,” said Kuroko simply, exposing completely without malice, and averted his eyes from the sky. "I tried to help you once, but I could not. It turned out to be too tough for me. And you were angry with me. For that I tried.”

May be he should have stayed away from this things, did not drag out covered with dust one-time mistakes, but it was better if dust would be dispelled by wind than if its clots  invaded you all inside.

 “Back then I was angry at the whole world,” Aomine answered with a phrase found in a long, strained pause, although when he spoke, it did not look as if he did not have enough words. “The world is you as well, like the sun or a tetra pack in your package. So do not take it personally, Tetsu.”

Aomine was spinning basketball on his finger, and the fact that this piece of orange rubber was still in his hands, after so many years, Tetsuya had a right to consider as his personal small merit.

 “Still, you should have said this long time ago,” Kuroko was smiling so much that you wanted to believe it.

Wreathing clouds, like a dragon, opened a huge mouth, and lightning cut the mirage in two – as if the first chimmes in the theater. Tetsuya carefully put the packet on the ground and, under the crushing roll of the thunder, walked along the court to Aomine, fine sand on the asphalt cracked under his deliberate steps.

 “It's a shame that there are things that you understand only in a certain age,” Kuroko sighed, looking at his feet. "It's like ... until a certain moment understanding is withheld from you. You do not have an access to the level. You don’t have consciousness. And then, when you do not bother about it at all, forget it or do not pay attention, reality suddenly gets to your mind, and you see ... you see everything,” Tetsuya raised his hand and his fingers snapped plunk. “In completely different colors.”

 “And what have you seen? " Aomine always looked down at him, heavily, attentively, but before meeting his eyes, Tetsuya would need to see everything else, from the sneakers and up, along the line of the legs, torso, strong neck, briefly along the line of the compressed lips. He was never afraid to look Aomine in the face, but now, right now, it was much more difficult.

They who had overcome a thousand steps, finally stepped on to the last one - a different level of frankness, and it was scary and exciting there.

 “We all ... were children,” Kuroko looked almost apologetic for his large-hearted pity. “Fourteen years on average. We had no goals, no minimal idea of what awaited us further. Well, didn’t have an idea about afterschool. Except Akashi’s life  which was planned in advance into precise stages, but it is rather horrifying. We had the right to choose. The right not to grow up. We should have just played basketball, like normal children.”

Aomine snorted and made a behind-the-back shot, the ball rounded the rim and dived into the ring.

“We never were normal children, Tetsu.”

“We were not allowed to be,” Kuroko corrected him.

 “You mean there was someone else to blame? I see no point in it. The whole "Generation of Miracles" was different from the very beginning. We were at the right time in the right place to make this obvious," Daiki frowned, inhaling the ozone-filled air. “Radioactive seeds that have fallen into fertile soil.”

"And on the packaging of this fertile soil was the title: "Ever-Victorious",” Kuroko mentally agreed, not without the bitterness which remained on his tongue from high school.

Tetsuya approached Aomine closely, so short if you compare, and took the ball - or rather, Daiki allowed him to pick it up because nothing was more natural between them than a pass.

 “You know, it happens: when a child is small at first and suddenly starts to grow too fast, it hurts and breaks the whole body,” said Kuroko, bounding the ball. “And the internal organs do not have time to adapt to these changes. The kidneys fall, or the liver becomes irregular in shape ...”

Aomine was observing the basketball, the white hands that was flashing in front of him, and already had guessed what Kuroko wanted to say. But he waited.

 “The same thing happened to us. By the end of high school we have turned into cripples. Hypertrophic ego, underdevelopmentof fear, symptoms of contempt and atrophied souls. We were more moral disabled than teenagers. Our radiation has burnt us.

All of Japan saw this flame. The blinding shine turning into a destructive fire, and the road of ashes behind being left after scorched casualties. There were all whom they trampled on the court, who were inspired and immediately humiliated, who were defeated with a gap of one hundred points. Aomine unconsciously withdrew his eyes - there are memories that you want to erase, - and dribbled Kuroko, taking away the ball from him with a glib movement.

 “You say "we", but you mean rather the five of us,” Daiki was milling about the ring. “It was us - me, Kise, Midorima, Murasakibara, Akashi ... we became monsters. Moral disabled and all that, eh?”

“Everyone breaks down and coalesces in their own way.”

It's easy to speak about it after so many years, Kuroko’s voice did not tremble, and his eyes were still the same, a bit childish, warm from the disappearing smile, and the color was pure ice. But all the same Aomine saw dozens of ghostly scars - traces of events that they had experienced at the same time, but in different ways. The glory, the talent which did not fit into the framework and selfishness had been deforming "Generation of Miracles" gradually, nibbling; everyone would accepted these changes, would absorb the poison, would change and adapt. And only Kuroko struggled, did not bend, and because of it - in a blink – he had being smashed into spills, as if chinned with a knee.

He rebuilt himself by pieces.

 “I understand. Everyone in their own way." Aomine lowered his head and grinned, behind the curve of his lips hiding something very similar to guilt. "You, Tetsu, are the exception to all the rules."

“Is that so?” Kuroko doubted, squinting through his hair that had caked his face.

Daiki threw him the ball.

“At least exception to all _mine_, this is for sure.”

“But you are still not going to explain to me what is happening to you,” there was a statement in half with irony in Kuroko's words. “Okay. When you are ready, you know my number. I’m not going to press on you.”

“Even if I do not tell you anything again?”

“We are not children any more. I can reconcile myself to the fact that you want to solve everything by yourself. I'll just stand there and watch you languish and suffer, Aomine-kun. No problem.”

 “Yes, this is good enough for us,” Aomine nodded confidently, only pretending to be joking, and there was so much depressive devotion to loneliness in it and so much of banal stupidity that Kuroko could not help to punch him on the head with the ball.

“Hey, what the f...” exclaimed one of the future greatest basketball players in Japan and grew numb, having met Tetsuya’s eyes.

 “I'm not made of iron, Aomine. I'm strong but not that much. So stop acting as if the sky has collapsed right on your head,” even when Kuroko frowned, his cool, quiet voice would not change. "Because I'll try to get you out again from under any rockslide, I'll try, I cannot behave any other way, and then some kind of stone will definitely break my back."

Another lightning illuminated the sky, the flash drew a curve on the black surface, and together with the fading light, in a fraction of a second, a tension never been visible before showed up in Dike's posture, stiffening the body as if the muscles had been cramped.

 “Well, the sky is really falling,” he said, raising his eyes to the clouds, as dark as his eyes and carrying a storm as well. He knew how to take a punch, despite the fact that he had never lost. Almost never. "Hey, Tetsu. Wasn’t it me who broke it all back then? Between us.”

Oh, Tetsuya, you should have better taken the fucking milk right home.

Had Momoi seen it? Had anyone seen it, not being deceived by external alienation and rudeness? Unimaginable guilt, balancing on Aomine’s shoulders, oppressing day after day and changeable like podagra. Kuroko always felt this strange guilt, under a layer of arrogant self-confidence - the blame for being the strongest, for not needing anyone, for hurting others in his own suffering.

It was good that Daiki's shoulders were so wide.

Kuroko swallowed the saliva which became so ropey, it seemed to him the first drop of rain fell on his lips, and something - it must have been, their friendship with Daiki - did not let him take his eyes off.

“I would lie to you, but I respect you too much for such villainy. Yes, it was you. But I ... I do not blame you. No house will survive an earthquake, if there is a crack in one of the walls,” the same words Tetsuya used to walk through at night in age of fourteen, choking with tears. One day, they definitely needed to talk about what had happened. But the expiration date of these sufferings went to the end.

Kuroko ran his fingers through his hair, wrung from the wind.

“You know,” he said to Aomine, “It would be better if we have played basketball.”

For a second Daiki looked at him, as if searching for a dirty trick - no wonder, ripping up half-coalesced wounds, you wait for the blood to flow, - and then he grinned and picked up the ball from the ground.

“I'm always up for, Tetsu.”

The rain crack down on them like a wall, knocked down the dust to their feet, and the sough and the dripping of the drops filled the evening. Through the stream of white water, Kuroko and Aomine was melting in a dance of fuzzy silhouettes, and onlooking  it seemed that they were two parts of one, retreating like a stretching spring and colliding again. Kuroko finger-combed his wet hair back: he barely could see because of the heavy eyelashes and he laughed every time the ball hit a puddle, raising a slather of dirty splashes. The cool air burned the lungs, but neither Aomine nor Kuroko thought of stopping. Water is life, basketball is life, and when you're idiotic happy, pneumonia is the last thing you worry about.

For everybody around, except for Kuroko, Aomine was the past. The thing which you go through, as if through the kingdom of the dead, and see after in heavy tedious dreams.

For Tetsuya, Aomine was the one to whom you looed in the eyes and did not speak, because words were not enough.

They had a bound. Maybe some nonsense at the molecular level, maybe a hallmark of the universe on their napes - hell knows, but whatever it was, it would not break. It would burst at the seams, crunch, bleed, become numb because of the shed tears and grievances, but then it always went easy. Kuroko realized it – felt it – back then on the court in the light of soffits Aomine held out his fist to him again. From that moment, Tetsuya knew, even if he had stabbed Aomine in the back with a knife, Daiki would have silently pulled it out and kissed the hilt.

Several years ago, Kuroko naively believed that it would be the same with Kagami, that all this was an adjunct to the "light-shadow" relationship, but it wasn’t. Sometimes the one you love is not the one with whom you are in chime with, but the one whose presence makes your heart stop. Tetsuya accepted this but did not know what to do with it.

Aomine milled about, turning the rain around them into a whirlwind of drops, and did not help to solve the thing at all. Daiki rather beset Kuroko, as if in a one-on-one fight, smiling, he wiped water with his hand, and with every movement he seemed to rock the boat in which both of them were. It was to roll over, together with this snafu world. Or maybe Tetsuya was just dizzy.

 

Kise's style was always graceful. It was like the art of dance, pure beauty.

Midorima’s basketball was accurate, like a mathematical calculation, a complex equation without mistakes.

Atsushi was a hurricane on the court, an earthquake, a dull destructive element.

Akashi's basketball resembled Go moves, some thoughtful, measured steps.

And Aomine’s basketball - this was life. An endless draft, dirty with rough strokes, clapped-out in an energetic handwriting and crumpled in three places, and on the pages of this life everything was like in honest human story: strokes, rises, falls - bright and close, right before your eyes.

So the court, losing its borders in the rain, was all in strokes that twisted around Kuroko in a spiral, no matter how hard he tried to break through, no matter how he played.

 “Usually it's incredibly boring - to go one-on-one, but now, with you, I even like it,” Aomine shared, passing Kuroko and not letting him prepare for the shot.

“Like walking with a god, I suppose,” Tetsuya deviated sharply to the right, taking the ball away from long dark hands. Just in time to not see the bitter smile on Daiki’s face.

“You do not hear me at all, do you?”

The world was swaying, the rain was slapping on their cheeks, the soaked clothes were heavy and licked to the body, and Tetsuya felt as if the abyss was about to throw oneself  at his feet, and he was going to fall into it.

Absolutely intuitively they were working out old, long-forgotten schemes, and around them, among the raindrops, there were ghosts - strong opponents without faces and names that needed to be dribbled. Perhaps it was themselves, a year ago, three years, those who needed to be wrestled to the ground and forgotten.

Drops fell down from the hair, twisted, merged, Kuroko saw Aomine slipped, and the ball flew out as an orange spot. He, Kuroko, he used to play almost everywhere, both on stones and sand, being trained by Aida he would have beaten this ball in a dream, so, following its direction and having come ahead of it, Tetsuya threw up his hand in a direct blow, and the ball rolled obliquely up, toward the basket. At the right moment, Aomine was already there; they didn’t need Fate for such a trick on the court. Daiki grabbed the ball and  tomahawk-like shot it into the basket. The thunder became their ovation.

It was a fabulous wet alley-up, what a pity that no one saw.

 “We shell repeat it!” laughed Daiki, slowly, with both hands, smoothing back his naughty hair. In fact, he was holding himself, with his trembling fingers by the strings. Water covered Tetsuya's eyes, and he did not understand how close Aomine approached him, with his animal-like soft unhurried steps. But it seemed to him that along with Daiki something else was coming at him.

 “After I pass the exams?"  Tetsuya suggested; he had to throw back his head to see the other’s face, and the water was flowing down his cheeks.

“Anytime,” Aomine leaned toward him, closer became his eyes, the storm-thundered sky and their mutual darkness. "When I play with you, I feel like a god."

For a brief moment, measured for Kuroko in the longest inhalation, it seemed to him that he did not feel the touches of the rain. Like in a dream when you belatedly and suddenly notice that fire does not burn and water flows down the clothes. You understand the unreality, you see holes in the scenery. Kuroko was deceived. He thought that he must have been asleep. And he almost came up with the right reply - the one of the hundreds that he could give to Aomine – when his mind turned on sounds. The rustle and cold of the water came down on Tetsuya with renewed strength, but this time drops did not flow down his cheeks, because Aomine closed his face from the sky, bending over and touching Kuroko’s lips with his own.

It was time for lightning, but Fate did well without cheap pathos.

Tetsuya did not have to remember that you needed to close your eyes. The eyelids lowered themselves, like a protective reflex to a struck in the face, and he shuddered all over his body and, it seems, froze.

The restless creature, who had been living behind his sternum and harassed him all the week, froze too.

Something broke off and flew down, to the very bottom.

The lips tasted of rain, of cold clean water. This purity and cold was pouring inside Daiki with scorching horror, filling him to the fingertips. He was so afraid, so fucking afraid to hear "no", was afraid of a push into the chest, fear was firing him from the inside. But Daiki could not live with it forever. As if searching for something, thievish and lightly, Daiki touched Tetsu's lips, picking up, running the tip of his tongue along the smooth inner edge, without going further, not insisting and not retreating, and only his hand squeezed Kuroko's shoulder, clenching the fabric of the T-shirt.

Aomine barely touched his lips, were barely breathing, but it was something on the limit, on the verge of what one’s body could express, and had been it a little more, and the glass of the surrounding houses would have flown into the cutting dust, as from shock wave.

Aomine barely touched, and it was impossible to push him away.

Kuroko wanted to step back. He, being a human, had the right to be afraid. But his feet did not obey, and Daiki's hand lay on the back of the head, forestalling any attempt to escape, and from the tearing, extremely cautious tenderness of his rough fingers, one could burst into tears.

The darkness in the eyes hid a puppy gaze.

Tetsuya never thought of anything like that. He wasn’t a saint - he simply did not allow himself to think, it was easier this way. And now here was some kind of devilry, and he - a strained string pierced by electricity - led his tongue along the thin lips, slower than death, and his fingers clenched in a broken grip on the collar of the white T-shirt. The taste was rain drops, and somehow it reminded water which couldn't quench your thirst.

 “What are you doing, Daiki?” Kuroko asked horribly evenly, touching his lips: the one phrase like a slap to a drunken ruffian, sobering, showing him his place.

“I think I'm breaking everything again,” Aomine whispered, and his palm, lying at the back of Kuroko's neck, squeezed, grabbing light strands, pleasantly painful.

“No, you do not think,” Kuroko looked from under the veiled eyelids, he once again was the enlightened monk, wiser, calmer; but trembling all over, and not from the cold at all.

“Yeah”, agreed Daiki, his look was heavy, suffocating. “I’m kissing you.”

The rain slapped on their shoulders, through the hair and the collar, and a huge, kilometer-long wall cut off here and now from the other reality, from everything that should have being remembered and known. If it were not for the  rain, the edges of the court would be visible, the mesh fence and the blocks of houses stretching to infinity, and one of them, maybe Kuroko, or maybe Aomine, would definitely stop. They always had reasons to sit quietly and not to show their mind, the fool were so often deceived, not suspecting anything. But through the veil of rain neither the sun nor the arguments of reason worked its way, there wasn’t a soul for a hundred meters around, raindrops was drumming on the roofs, painted fences and trees dark. Everything that could interfere had been cared by Fate. It's impossible to keep yourself on a leash all your life - either you strangle yourself, or the loop breaks.

Daiki had been suffocating for an eternity, and now he took air from Kuroko, with every missed sigh, by seconds, pulled him closer to himself, higher, and kissed more and more greedily, growing stupid with thirst.

“Say something,” asked Daiki, whispering, pressing his forehead against Kuroko’s forehead, palms on his thin hands.

Kuroko threw back his head, catching the water with his lips, the sky was just above his head, without end and edge, and because of it and of the low voice his heart missed a beat.

“Wet,” Tetsuya said husky, the first thing he thought about. "And, you know ... Daiki, you ... should ... have enlighten me about this ... long before."

"This" included all the "do not", vacuum and boundless, impenetrable darkness - everything Tetsuya did not know about, but felt somewhere deep under the skin, could not help felt - it penetrated into him like radiation, no matter how hard Aomine tried to constrain himself.

“Do you want to hear everything?” he asked, as if warning; the rushed back fear, like falling waves, revealed a frightening determination.

Tetsuya shrugged, not very well as Daiki's fingers were tightening his wrists more and more.

“Since we have started.”

The distant thunder shook the sky, the water was flowing down their hair in streams, flooding their eyes. Aomine nodded, slowly absorbing this answer, memorizing the scarlet flourish of the lips on the other’s face. He released Kuroko's wrists, caressing the white skin for the last time, weightlessly, unexpectedly for a man who seemed to know only how to break, and then took a step back. The distance  - glaringly wrong - increased, opened up as a crack. It was a slap to the all thoughts of self-sufficiency – Tetsuya almost felt that he was left alone. Had been abandoned, buried in the sand up to the throat. But Aomine said only:

 “Let's go then,” If this wasn’t a giving of option, then Kuroko never really knew the man in front of him.

Aomine - a living statue – stood and waited.

As if Tetsuya was able to refuse.

 

They left the court, squinting because of the drops whipping in the face, having grabbed the iron gates in farewell. The trampled earth was not soaked. Step, another, a third, toward the  nowhere hidden in rain, hearts pounding in the chest - unbearable. Aomine was ahead, Kuroko was behind him, a shadow - as always - and both, without agreeing, suddenly broke off to run. Through the stream of rain, as if through a maelstrom, their jumps caused mass of sprays, pools puddled under their feet, but for some reason it seemed that the broken glass crackled. The wall of rain broke abruptly, and the huge, heavy and gray had hanged overhead - it was not the sky, but the flags of the bridge. On the side the canal was bubbling and foaming, whipped with millions of drops, and the concrete support of the bridge reliably dug into the ground.

The water flowed from their hair, ran down their arms, ripping off the elbows. Kuroko pulled the bottom of the T-shirt, squeezing it out - an action completely useless and necessary when the world was shaking underfoot, like a swing. Aomine passed by, two steps away - calmly, as if it wasn’t him with a withdrawal just a minute ago; he sat down on the basement in the brig’s pavement, and his breath (hot - it felt even at a distance) rattled hoarsely from his throat; why, Tetsuya thought, they had ran crosses tougher  than this.

 “Look, there are matches,” Aomine nodded at the box lying on the concrete, his head rubbed against the rough wall, black on gray. “It's strange.”

“What exactly?” Kuroko asked.

“There are matches, but no cigarette butts”, explained Aomine hoarsely and held out his hand, took the box, twisted it in his hands in a perfunctory manner. As if the damn matches really were worth attention right at the moment, even when muscles did not obey properly.

For Daiki it was the same as wringing a wet T-shirt out, the action was a respite, Kuroko understood, and from the outside point of view it was easier to see how stupid and pathetic they turned out to be. They came here hardly realizing why. Aomine put out the box, carefully took out a match so to not touch its head with the wet fingers,  struck a rough grater. In the dusk, in the sound of rain, a subtle flame arose.

Kuroko felt the world around him shrinking to an unprecedentedly small scale - a piece of land under the bridge. Distance of two steps. When Daiki wasn’t on the court, when he did not hold the ball in his hands, he was like a loaded gun, left alone on the table.

Waiting can last forever, even if it's only a few seconds, for which a paltry chip will have burnt. Charring and bending, the match was thinning, embraced by a ruthless fleshless flame, and the flame encircled Aomine’s pupils in yellow crescents - almost scary.

This could be taken as a ritual, a sacred act, an attempt to pacify one's own demons, but Daiki looked up at Kuroko and there was not a hint of peace and humility in his eyes.

Aomine gazed in the way that something inside was being squeezed and ready to burst into bloody scrapes because of his look - painful and scary. The flame grew larger and closer to the fingers, Daiki kept gazing, and Tetsuya felt naked, defenseless and opened, as if all the darkness, all the lust and thirst that were hidden there, rushed at once and devoured him. Alive.

Kuroko went to Aomine - two steps - squat down in front of him and blew the flame.

 “You can burn yourself, you now,” he said. Aomine did not answer. He snatched Tetsuya behind his neck - five hot fingers on the seventh vertebra,  - and drew him for a kiss.

The pain would have sobered him, the fire was still hotter than skin, but the match was already in the mud under his feet. And too long it had being burning.

Aomine pressed his lips to Kuroko's lips, singed with a ragged exhalation and licked greedily, again and again, touching with his teeth, not letting him answer. He would devoure Kuroko lock, stock and barrel if he could , but he couldn’t so he only kissed tirelessly, deeply - not like at first time at all, and his hand moved on the white neck by itself, to the carotid artery, and the pulse was beating in the palm. Kuroko laid his hands on Aomine’s knees, either catching balance or holding him, and fingers, having slipped across his hips, clenched into fists, raking the light black cloth of the trousers. Of the two of them, he probably never really was afraid of it.

Aomine did not understand how one could be so weak and so strong at the same time.

 “I see, you're not going to tell "everything", Tetsuya muttered, throwing his head back, piercing with a look from under the eyelashes.

“I can’t find the words,” Daiki answered hoarsely, leaving his lips, kissing gently from the cheekbones and down, along the gradual line of Kuroko’s jaw.

“Is it really that hard?”

A pull back there was, firm pull by the hair, not really hurting - no, no pain between them, never, - and Tetsuya's eyes were serious, cold and bottomless. There is no perfect surface without horrific depth.

“What if I lie?” Aomine whispered.

Words, they are like keys, the main thing is to find the right one, but Daiki wasn’t good at it, and he always had to rely on a crowbar – which was rudely but clearly. Tetsuya knew him, he knew people in general, and he knew Daiki especially, and the more funny - the more ridiculous - was how he had all _this_ missed. It was necessary to ask, to know a secret - for the future; Tetsuya opened his mouth, smudging Aomine’s fingers with his wet lips and teeth, but heard only a stiff, low moan, belatedly realizing that it was born in his own chest – it was strange but not shame. Aomine grabbed him by the collar of his T-shirt and pulled him up and forward on his knees, so that Kuroko's hips lay on his own, chest to chest, and it was much more convenient now to embrace - a realization of a good half of wet teenage dreams.

Kuroko bore his palms first against the cold wall - on either side of Daiki’s head, - then against Daiki's shoulders, squeezing to bruises; he was a point guard after all, his fingers were strong, as well as his blow; and his head spun, and deep inside something  ached sweetly and hurt . Tetsuya would like gather his scattered mind, unite tattered thoughts, but Aomine stroked his thumbs along the dimples behind Kuroko’s ears, broad along his back, along the wiry hands, teasing him with the touches at the t-shirt edges, squeezing his palms into Kuroko’s tight muscles, disturbing him, and everything with him was close to the limit, relying on the first instincts – like to catch the ball at the last moment.

As if the bridge were about to collapse on their heads and bust under and they should have being in harry to feel the taste, to catch the shiver - not from the cold at all; no one tried to look eyes to eyes, down or not the eyelids were, is was dark all the same, and the bridge flags picked up uneven breaths, spreading them – like something vulgar, switched at maximum volume right in the next apartment. Somehow it seemed that sitting like this they were closer to each other than ever, it  caused head noises and the body burned like in a fever, incinerating itself in a thirst for contact - not the accidental one contact, no, only here, this way only. The forehead, lips, cheeks, wrists were about to meet, chaotically, and it was not clear whether Aomine and Kuroko were giving or if they were trying to get; greed it was or generosity.

 “I could explain,” Daiki smiled, quite joylessly, hugging tightly, with his hands under Kuroko’s T-shirt, skin to skin. “But you will not believe.”

After something like this, one would believe anything. Tetsuya leaned back as far as possible, a tight string was stretching from his to Aomine’s ribs.

“ If you are so bad with words,” he said hoarsely, pressing his finger to Aomine's thin lips, “then do without them.”

Daiki looked sardonically, he always was more dangerous than what you expected him to be, and his white teeth closed for a moment, biting, giving a chance to feel the heat and moisture of his mouth.

“Hey, you will  be exhausted, and I will not finish yet.”

“Settle for two halves,” Tetsuya said, and it sounded like an order.

Sometimes he would stare in such a way that it seems the blood burned veins due to it.

The rain stopped at once, as if its drops dissolved in the residual summer heat. Torn scraps of thunderstorm rushed to the east, and the declining sun, clinging to the clear horizon  with its dying breath, painted them in blood-red. The golden light run through the approaching twilight, flashed in flares through the water of the canal, sparked in the humid air, and went under the brig with scattered warmth. It did not got only an inches to reach the white back of Kuroko, on which the T-shirt was slowly creeping up - a wet cloth upward, and drops of sweat downward along the spine, and shadows drew the muscles.

How silly is was: there, on the court, Aomine did not know what to do, touched Kuroko like a crystal, - trying not to smash, not to spoil everything – it was scary; if you are not got used of taking care, then after the loss you will learn to; and now he kissed, hugged eagerly with impatient hands, pulled the collar of the T-shirt and traced the stripes along the collarbones weightlessly, inhaled the smell of the hair – now he could - and was going crazy with the sensation of Tetsuya's hands on his own body, his grasp on his neck and frequent kisses on his bare shoulders. Like two idiots who broke down from the dome of the circus without any insurance, it was no longer possible to stop, and Daiki knew that he would not be able to stop, and he himself did not notice how he pulled down the Kuroko’s belt, how the zipper whacked. The sound was thunder.

Tetsuya froze, strained with every muscle, like a hunted beast, and rushed to the side, getting up.

 “Wait,” breathed Daiki sharply, taking Kuroko’s face in the palms of his hands, holding it. "Easy," he whispered, reasoning, his lips on Kuroko’s cheek, as if his words were enough to remove all the barriers. “Easy, I said,” through his teeth, smoothing the waist, the sides and the tight belly. "Look into my eyes, Tetsu. Look in the eyes. And breathe, understand? Breathe.”

And Kuroko had no choice but to breathe, to cling with his weak hands to the shirt, which had slipped from Daiki's shoulder, and moan at the top of his voice, pitifully and terribly loud - for him who always was quiet and inconspicuous. The jeans tensed on the knees rubbed the skin, and the nerve endings were like bare wires. All this was wrong, without accordance to the rules, in the wrong way and in the wrong place, the hell knows why it even was going on : Aomine's hand – uncertainly because he was scared too - in Kuroko's pants, under the elastic band of boxers. The tocsin of the pulse was like a drum in his ears, and the heat, and the hunger, and this damned darkness right in front of the eyes – in front of him were expended to the limit pupils. Kuroko had no choice, from the very beginning.

Aomine never imagined what it would be like to hold someone who breathes so rapidly and loudly.

Kuroko in his turn had never imagined anything, and the sounds from the dark red mouth all rolled into low pathetic moans - listen and remember, catch them.

It was tight in his own pants, and in the hand of someone else's erect (what's the difference anyway?) cock – fuckingly awesome level of trust if you think about it, and it seemed that everything could become even more intimate as you were more and more gentle with your finger on the dick head, as if picking a tonality; but the matter was not about the body after all.

Their rhythm was uneven and strange, Daiki did not manage to count, neither aloud, nor to oneself; masturbating someone and yourself was not the same thing, but Kuroko bent forward anyway, pushing in the palm of his hand, bending his eyebrows taut - he did not really need to be gentle or cautious, and even about this they fit each other perfectly, whether having adjusted or being originally created so.

Not a shame, not at all, but to the pain in the chest not enough, and how much longer, Tatsuya wondered, how long would it be not enough?

The oversaturated seconds stretched for an eternity, marked in flashes before the eyes, and even you gasped with the entire larynx - oxygen was not enough. But it was among this haze that Aomine found the old words, the words being worn out in unrealized conversations, and began to whisper them: incoherently, in Kuroko’s ear, through a crooked grin. He told how Kise would infuriate him - first with his ignorance, then with his hypertrophied friendliness. A fucking golden retriever, getting under his feet, getting around Kuroko. There was a desire to break his nose, twice, and throw him in a ditch. How he hated Akashi; for pulling Tetsu out of the third gym, for dragging him into all this, he dragged him through _ all this _ and threw him, falling apart. How Aomine hated himself, too, and how often he wanted to embrace Kuroko so that the bones would crack, and how stupid he was that did not do it and just would walk alongside, tearing holes in the pockets with his fingers.

 “Even now, Tetsu, you know, I understand that it's hard for you to listen, you might prefer to give me a punch if only your legs weren’t shutting down, I understand it. But I am not going to shut up, because it is already a habit to leave as many marks in you as possible. Bind you to me. You're my fucking shadow, you know, you must always be her.”

Daiki spoke, and this was too much, simply too much, as if for all the past years at once, a payoff  for every day passed, and Kuroko hunched over, buried himself into Aomine's neck, hiding, it was already more than enough for him even without the words, though after the words it became totally unbearable. Daiki was whispering something else, he said a lot of things, touching the pierced tip of his ear with his lips, knew that every phrase was an autograph, a hallmark, but Tetsuya clearly remembered the slammed into the mind, like a burn on the skull: "Love me only."

Tetsuya wanted to scream "Shut up,", but only clenched his moist with saliva teeth on the Aonime’s dark collarbone, pushing air out of the lungs. From pleasure, from sweet pain, from horror and delight all the once-broken, mutilated by borders and adnate bones of his feelings were cracking and straightening. Those things that should have died - were doomed to die, being left by him, by an absurd, invisible guy… that's what scared the most, because no matter how people get smart, no matter what evolutionary path they come up with, and nuclear warheads are easier to be controlled than love is.

Whatever it takes only to make Aomine silent.

Kuroko leaned back with the feeling that he was about to fall down into a ravine. His fingers, seemingly numb, slowly slid along the white T-shirt, lower and lower, Tetsuya looked Daiki in the eye and put his open hand to the bulge on his pants, fingers pointing to the concrete to get closer, stronger, and he pressed, as if gathering in a handful. Aomine shuttered, and his last word on exhalation turned into a groan, and Tetsuya himself felt like being blown by an electric current, from the hand and through the body, to the failure of the sinus rhythm. Felt nothing, if you compare with Daiki.

 “See what you're doing?” Tetsuya asked, as if accusing, and so it would have sounded if not for his dull eyes and obedience-response for every touch.

“I am all eyes,” Daiki assured him, teasing him with effort, and pulled him closer, kissing his deliriously exposed eyelids.

"Can it be like this," thought Kuroko so far he could think. "Up to the drunk stupor, to the darkness in the head?"

The sun, had hidden behind the horizon, dragged the last sunset rays from the firmament, and twilight overthrew a starless cool night on Tokyo. Somewhere one by one unsuccessful calls glooped, the last drops fell from the leaves, but for Aomine and Kuroko everything was afterwards - both shame and an awry awkward conversation, and a long journey in wet clobbers across the city in silence, and a hasty, last-second kiss on the temple.

It was a rough, dirty work, but Fate, in fact, didn’t care.

 

<6>

 

 “Are you sure you can eat all this?” Kuroko asked, tactfully pointing to the giant pyramid of ice cream. In fact, it was second vase in an hour: some full-cream, strawberry, banana, espresso on the sides - he felt bed only looking at this, but politeness - first of all.

Momoi just smiled and moved the dish closer, the umbrella standing at the table dyed her hair in a bluish color.

 “I understand that a girl should eat a little like a bird, but I can’t indulge in a sweet one,” she said, putting off her cellphone and scooping up a layer of chocolate. "It must be a good lucky that I do not get fat. Everything goes in the boobs”.

“Satsuki-san ...”

Kuroko almost сhoke-bored with a cocktail, and well-bred girl Momoi immediately flushed and blushed, embarrassed by her own words. However, this did not stop her from passing Tetsuya a napkin.

“You haven’t hear anything,” Momoi sang, smiling with that same smile that would turn her into a beautiful monster, and Kuroko preferred to keep silent. He was used to the fact that people were not what they seemed to be.

The stifling heat of the summer long ago dissolved in the light September wind. Like being gilded, thick tree crowns rustled, and more rapidly layers of fleeing somewhere clouds slipped away over the city. His heart beat even, smoothly, the tables in the cafe were almost empty, sparkling cars flew along the road in an endless stream. Kuroko followed the crowd of indifferent passers-by with a glance, sipped a strawberry cocktail, and his inner state, perhaps, could be expressed in the word "calmness." Some kind of a flat calm.

 “Would you like some?” Satsuki smoothly handed Kuroko a spoonful of ice cream, seeming like a great tempter, except for she was dressed.

Tetsuya was always too tough for her.

“No, thanks. I will hold my hand for a while.”

“I cannot believe it,” Momoi snapped. “You have not recovered yet.”

“I’m sorry,” Tetsuya was uncompromising.

Momoi sighed heavily, just a little bit to overplay it, and said as if by the way, scraping off the white cold shavings:

“How did you manage to catch cold in the middle of August anyway?”

Instead of answering, Kuroko grabbed a straw with his lips and sucked the rest of the foam out of the cocktail, shshshshuf, the transparent plastic rattled hollow. Kuroko was sure that Momoi already knew everything herself, and if not, Tetsuya did not want to upset her.

He would not be able to explain, even if he wanted to. The words got stuck somewhere deep, not reaching the throat, did not leave his frail body. It would be worth ordering another glass.

Long time ago, Momoi cried and told Kuroko, how painful, insulting, inexpressibly bad, when what you created, united and regarded as your family, suddenly fell apart. Bared teeth, hostile parts. Momoi told in awe, choking with tears, as if Kuroko himself had never cried or roared, much as if his very soul bursting with pain was in that salt water.

Kuroko smiled sadly at his thoughts and squeezed his straw with his fingers. He realized very early that there were things that you just need to rub through.

Drink strawberry cocktail and rub it through.

“Are you already used to the new schedule?” Tetsuya asked, setting the empty glass aside, tracing an invisible line across the table.

Satsuki waved a spoon lightly, glanced at the mobile screen with the corner of her eye.

“I beg you, Kurokocchi,” she said, with one facial gesture expressing all her contempt for any difficulties. “I have never had a problem with organizing something. However,  the campus map took two days of learning, there is a ten minute walk from one building to another. And after the invention of tablets, I generally feel like a Goddess of Time. Well, until the battery is discharged – such a pity every time.

“But?..” Kuroko raised his eyebrows questioningly.

“What "but"?”

Tetsuya was looking at Momoy silently, so serious and simple at the same time, he was looking  and as if wresting her soul, and who would know what he saw there, this boy who studied and read people like books.

“All right,” Satsuki sighed, giving up. “Well. You know, I just think so often about everything now. Just think about how we live. It's a never-ending race, beginning  from school, class after class,” Satsuki's fingers, like legs, paced the edge of the vase. “Learn, cram, all those terabytes of unnecessary information a year. And from there you go to a university with a jump. Tackle and go forward, run-run-run, and there is this eternal burden of responsibility on your shoulders, and everyone says that we should be ready for adult life, and what the hell is this adult life? None of us really know. And who needs me, in this adult life?”  Momoi looked at Tetsuya as if she was waiting for him to give her an answer right there. The answer that no one had.

“Are you afraid you did something wrong, Momoi-san?" Tetsuya said, rather a statement than a question, and his soulless eyes frightened her, he wasn’t not even crumpling a napkin, sat straight, and it was like talking to a ghost. Momoi was best understood by a phantom guy.

“Ha, yes. I'm afraid. We do not have time to think about it, we are like on the chain conveyor. " Satsuki stopped and looked at Kuroko again. “I just do not want to realize in the third year of studies that I should have appeal not for economist, but for auto mechanic.

Kuroko glanced at her well-groomed white hands, pleasantly pink fingertips and neat nails that tapped a march across the mobile phone screen.

“Just name it, and I'll ask my father to take you to the garage,” he smiled, raising his eyebrows, and Satsuki could not stand it, she burst out laughing, quietly and melodiously.

“I'll keep that in mind. And you yourself are not afraid, Kurokocchi?

“There are other things that are really worth being afraid,”  Tetsuya answered, and someone said once something similar before him.

The empty glass sparkled in the sun, and the ice cream slowly sank from the heat. It was time to change the subject, turn away from the line.

“That girl, from your stream,” Kuroko recalled. “With short blond hair. How is it going?”

“I hit the wedges,” Momoi shared with joy and lightly tossed her hair off her shoulder. On solid ground it was easier to pretend a dolly-bird, and how she loved Kuroko for being so easy-going. “She has an outstanding character, worse than Dai-chan, but it makes this even more interesting. I like it. I guess it's already a diagnosis, huh?” Satsuki smiled, and Kuroko shook his head.

“Sometimes I think that it's due to Teiko you has changed to another league,” he admitted.

“Oh, Kurokocchi, do not put your blame on others,” Momoi laughed, but, seeing a completely bewildered look, she stopped. “Just kidding. From the very childhood I like girls more. But it was more fun to play with boys. They were somehow more heartfelt and more cheerful." Momoi glanced again at the screen. Still the boys would not come on time, and it was impossible to plan something accurately with them.

Satsuki looked thoughtfully somewhere behind Kuroko and called the waiter, asked for a couple more menus.

The thick stream of people continued to pass by slowly, and even in the shade of the umbrella, the descending from the zenith sun blinded the eyes. The figure of Murasikibara rose above the crowd of cobby Japanese like a tower, and he – so tall, stooped – could not be mixed with anyone. Squinting in the sun through the hair strands, he casually tossed chips into his mouth and lazily moved his infinitely long legs, unlike others who were ridiculous and constrained, not afraid at all of hurting or injuring someone. Midorima, who walked beside him, seemed smaller, but the glass of his spectacles gleamed pronouncedly seriously in the sun; and being abreast with him, resilient and cheerful Takao smiled ear-to-ear, certainly so happy  for not having to carry a rickshaw this day. Across the road, right next to the pedestrian crossing, Kise's soft voice rang and sparked, mixed as always with girls’ chirping and laughter.

Such coincidences were impossible. Not with them. They have reached  the ceiling at high school.

Kuroko looked at Momoi. Damn intriguer she was.

“What did you do?” he asked, already feeling what he should not have yet.

“A couple of calls, honestly, honestly,” Satsuki smiled, shoving the phone off the table, as if everything was good, as if it was just a meeting of old friends, but the guilt, the real one, was already imprinted on her face, showed in a gaze reminding of a chased deer. “Kuroko, do not hate me, please. Do not hate, okay?”

Satsuki stood up, displacing the vase of ice cream for some reason, and hurried off under the shade of the umbrellas to the sidewalk, and Kuroko was watching her go not seeing, and was falling  somewhere, and wondering: on the right or on the left?

On the left.

Aomine came out from behind, recognizable by soft steps, passed by, on the left hand, pushed a chair and sat opposite, face to face, and when he spoke, his voice was low, and the sounds - viscous.

 “Hello, Tetsu.”

 

Someone do something and you have to live with it.

 

The menu pages swished from the wind, the umbrella cloth clapped rarely. Kuroko parted slowly his dry lips and responded, with detachment, as always:

“Long time no see, Aomine-kun.”

 

A simple formality, it was like saying "I see you". Daiki kept it up only because he considered the minimum of manners to be important, and (being frankly) when they with Kuroko looked at each other's eyes - clinging the glances - it was more like "you are the only one I see." Daiki's eyes were as dark as always, he was silent - formalities were over, and Kuroko still was expected to ask:

“Momoi-san has invited you?”

Somewhere in the crowd Atsushi was twirling around shrilling Satsuki.

“No. It was I who told her to call you." Daiki shrugged. “But she always over-eggs the pudding if you give her instructions."

“ Why do you do this?”

“I do not believe in fate, if you remember. Have to rely on myself.”

Kuroko raised his eyebrows.

“You have my number.”

“You would not pick up the phone.”

Aomine ceased to be talkative years ago, maybe it was too lazy for him - thick blood or something else - but during this time he learned to put in short phrases everything that others would write in paragraphs.

Tetsuya did not care, he would understand then, understood this time. Only this time he looked at Aomine, and his lips ached, and it was necessary to get rid of this, and he did not want to, to tears. Therefore, he had to speak.

 “Should not you be in the States?”

Probably, had Kuroko attach a gun to his chin, Aomine would be surprised more.

“You do know?” he asked, frowning, and immediately corrected, because - of course Kuroko knew, but this was not the main thing, not at all. “How long do you know?”

Kuroko could read people, Aomine could read Kuroko, but this time he was struck with the wrapped in ice armor calmness.

 “Momoi  babbled it out once, back in May. Mentioned that you had applied. I was very surprised at the court back then. Usually freshmen leave for the university one month before the semester. You were not supposed to be here.”

Slowly but steadily, the simple table in the cafe was turning into a different galaxy, unnamed and very distant, in a few billion years away, where no sound could break through, no light. Daiki was looking at Kuroko, intently as he always did, from the top to the bottom, unreadable, and was trying to understand how could that be... So far the guess, the simple one and even more painful on this reason, had not occurred to him.

 “You thought I had ran away,” Aomine leaned forward, laying his hands on the table, sweeping away the illusion of a barrier.

Kuroko did not move an inch, among  two of them more self-control was in his favor. And it would have been more correct to say "allowed to run away", because Kuroko did allowed, sparing Aomine like a child, upon whom responsibility still wasn’t loaded.

“I assumed that this was easier for you.”

If Aomine had not suffocated in the hot anger, he would have yelled, definitely would, but there only his whisper nailed Kuroko to the spot. It's so shitty that people take the power over you on their own.

“No fu... It isn’t better for anyone, Tetsu”.  Aomine negated through the clenched teeth. “For whom this can be easier anyway?!”

“You tell me”.

Kuroko wasn’t  a candy man, wasn’t  a weakling, wasn’t a silly child, he simply was the right man, somehow and in his own way, so that he would put anyone on their knees, so that one would feel shame in front of him - Daiki had always felt; and this time Aomine was ashamed because Tetsu's look hurt like a bullet clean through, for every day of radio silence, for every dream, for hot water in the bathroom which would not wash off the marks, for this damn cafe and phrases being round and round.

"If you want to tell me something, then say it."

Aomine opened his mouth and realized that he was too sober for that, that his fingers tremored, so he stumbled right there, bursting into swear words, and he used to try so hard to avoid opprobrious language in front of Kuroko.

“Shit, Tetsu, I ...”

Сhair back creaked shrilly, the round table staggered, and Kuroko's face became very close. Suffocating.

“I love you,” he said, looking Daiki in the eyes. “So much that I do not care if you don’t love me. And it does not pass however hard I try. And it eats me from the inside. Do you understand?”

The sun can burn out all the shadows. Theoretically, because there are no shadows on the scorched land. And this was that Aomine had always expected - that he would burn Kuroko to the ground. But now Tetsuya sat opposite to him, resolute and wicked, and asked: "Do you agree to _me_? Are not you afraid? We – will it be? "And it was wild, and the consciousness was covered with deafening silence.

“Yes,” answered Daiki, almost touching Kuroko’s lips; the unnamed galaxy crashed into smithereens. “I feel the same shit.”

“So that is how it goes,” Tetsuya whispered, looking from Daiki’s eyes to his lips and back.

“Aha,” Aomine settled back, gave a testing glance, inhaling oxygen it seems for the first time in the last few minutes. "You realize that after all that ... hell I’m not going anywhere? I'll hold your hand, call at night, bring you treats .”

"And I will clutch you in every corner, and be jealous, and will put all the mugs on the top shelf, and will ensconce you, and count your moles, and kiss the spinal bones under your skin."

 “I'll survive somehow,” Kuroko swallowed and slowly pulled away, wadded feet clinging to the table leg. He had just signed a contract with his own blood. "They're coming," he warned, nodding toward the road. From there, bypassing the tables, the Teiko former players approached, with Takao on the pods, and they walked like forty-seven ronins in their best years.

“I do not care!” However, Daiki also sat a little bit more up straight because Tetsuya was sitting  up straight, but in the last moment he said, as if sewing Kuroko by a needle: “Do not you dare to disappear afterwards. I'll find you, even if you do not pick up the phone.”

The basketball players hit like an iridescent whirlwind - greetings poured down, shifted from all sides chairs began to creak across the slabs.

“Look at this,” Kise purred, click tinkling on the dirty dishes. “Well, we are strangers in this celebration of life!

“Your every day is a holyday, be more modest,” Atsushi scraped smoothly the vase of melting ice-cream, and Midorima calmly offered him a spoon, squeezed between two bandaged fingers.

“Muracchi, this is mine,” Satsuki blew her cheeks like an offended child, but her eyes laughed, even when Atsushi looked at her with the expression of an angry dog.

“Are you greedy or what?”

“Offer her barter,” Aomine advised, grinning almost naturally. “When she was about five years old one could exchange almost anything from her.”

Kise hemmed, opening the menu.

“An interesting feature for a lady.”

“Barter?” Murasakibara raised his eyebrows unperturbedly and the goose mask poured from Momoi like sand.

“Okay, give your cell phone here,” she said, throwing one slender leg on the other.

Atsushi handed her the phone.

“No problem.”

“And you, Kurokocchi, too.”

The rumble of voices rose. Tetsuya looked in surprise at the invocatory opened little palm.

“I think I have said that I will keep my hand off ice-cream for now.

“Hey, hush,” Kise exclaimed, becoming interested. "What she is going already looks like a plan."

“Then it's time to shout "lie down," Daiki muttered, and Takao burst out laughing, immediately deserving an annihilating look from Midorima.

Shintaro looked closely at Momoi, and perhaps he should have applied to the police academy with such a stern look.

“Why do you need our cell phones? Do you collect phone numbers?”  as well as his shots were accurate his questions would hit the target.

“In general, yes,” Momoi did not see the point of denying it. The boys looked at each other in confusion, and she could not resist, whispered enthusiastically: "I have an idea!"

“Lie down,” Daiki summed up, turning to the waiter.

Ryota pointed at him with a retributive finger.

“Hey, you're offending the girl.”

Offended Satsuki snorted and flicked her hair back, pouring the seated boys over with a fragrant of expensive perfume. Among all of those presented it was only Tetsuya who was shorter than her, but Momoi, when she wanted, was able to look down on anyone. And this time, in addition to her usual confidence, the sense of her own unshakable rightness supported the girl, and a woman convinced in something, it is known, can be equated with an asphalt compactor.

 “Aomine,” she said, as if counting, and pointed out casually at the childhood friend. “Three street fights at the beginning of summer, five more at the end, one of them is an interim arrest. Of course, everything worked out, but ... This is the man who is too lazy to scratch his knees...”

Daiki could look more bored in a dream only, for whatever else he could feel guilty but not for the whipped knuckles; whether Kuroko’s eternal equanimity somewhat failed him this time, and not him alone - Midorima looked at Daiki over the spectacles like a head teacher would look at an impenitent hooligan and he even did not know that much, from the worst periods of the scorer.

“ ... Kise Ryota,” Satsuki continued. “Becomes handsomer with every year, but during the summer he would call me steadily and mewled once a week about how he, the gloss star, was bored.

“He called you too?” Murasakibara asked wonderingly without taking a spoon from his mouth, and Kise, already having sipped his ice tea, choked on such glaring tactlessness.

 “Kuroko Tetsuya; he is sitting there, the quiet and innocent one, as if he hasn’t brought everyone here to snotty tears at least once. (Except for Dai-chan, of course). Him devils carried somewhere in the midst of a thunderstorm, and Kurokocchi nearly caught the pneumonic fever. If would be better if he caught because at least twice he was seen in street games around the Meghuro Canal,” Momoi's voice was vibrating vividly in the range of a frequent guest of radio broadcasts, she became herself again - a sentimental beautiful monster; and perhaps only Aomine and Tetsuya caught those special notes, which, like a mocking sign, were intended specially for them. "It's scary to talk about Murachii. In early September, his father called me, because Atsushi had lost his appetite.”

 “I see,” Takao grunted, clutching his lips amusing: a glass vase with ice-cream was almost completely emptied, not counting the puddle of chocolate cream in the center. "Hey, wait, Momoi-san, why did Murasakibara's father call you?"

Satsuki doomed the embarrassing question to oblivion, for the secrets of  “Generations of Miracles” remained their secrets, even if it was a trifle, and this was one of the few features that Aomine really respected in her - consciously.

 “So shall I continue?” Momoi asked, tapping her nails on a half-empty glass of chocolate, and if anyone was going to respond positively, Midorima's voice repulsed the desire.

“We already understood that there was a reason you applied as a financial analyst,” he said, adjusting his spectacles. "Tell what you're leading, Momoi."

Satsuki smiled, cute, not pretending at all, and explained:

“Oh, Sin-chan, that's a simple truth. You're all gonna go crazy without basketball.

With a loud sucking sound, Atsushi licked the spoon, and this was the only thing that broke the silence. Kuroko bit his lip, superseding with one pain the echo of that old one, and somehow it turned out that everyone so far glanced at his serious attentive eyes for a second. Perhaps none of them took the risk of catching pneumonia this summer, wasn’t unable to stop being in love, and did not sit this moment, pressing the knee to Aomine's leg, but everyone - Tetsuya knew - also nearly lost their mind in four walls, tormented by ghostly sensations of the game, and everyone was afraid of this new life, in which there was nothing familiar. And everyone believed that university teams are a totally boring shit. They already felt underfed.

“Okay, let it be,” Kise left his ice-tea casually and pressed his finger to his lips; a stupid habit that irritated him so much. “What do you suggest?”

Satsuki spinned the phone on the table, the plastic slipped repugnantly against the ceramics.

“I'll call all your former teammates. I'll talk to everyone. I will make a list. And then all interested will gather in the week somewhere in the gym, and you will play by random cast.

Takao leaned forward.

“By random?” He repeated. “That is, let's say, Kise and Kuroko with the Too guys against Midorima and Aomine as a part of Seirin? Do I understand correctly?”

Momoi bent her head to her shoulder, smiling, and the sly shine in her eyes was the best answer.

“Holly fuck,” Takao fell back on the chair. "This should be shown on national television," he said, causing condescending smiles, and repeated again: "Holly fuck. How much money would it be”.

“You continue to swear in front of the girl, and I will trot you to death no matter in which gym. Personally," said Midorima naturally and, taking into account his pedantry and loyalty to the word, the threat was quite real. Having dealt with sulky Takao, he turned to Satsuki. “I'm sorry for him. Going back to business, how do you plan to form the teams?”

Momoi shrugged her shoulders, she had several options. But Tetsuya, without hesitation, answered for her.

“The sortition,” he said as if there could be no doubt, and Aomine could not help grinning and rubbed his hip against Kuroko’s knee.

While someone was talking, guessing, eating ice cream, Aomine and Kuroko sat face to face and tried not to show how huge, light, simple and at the same time incredibly multifaceted stupid happiness that they had just created – _they_ had done it, not Fate – were tearing them into pieces from the inside. The happiness was one for both of them, that's why it wanted to unite, and no matter how much darkness there was in it, how much destructive force.

Although, he and Aomine were just an elephant in the room. And somebody would have noticed this particular aura which had been bowering them from the very secondary school, if only Satsuki had not suddenly lifted her head and screamed, spoiling the image of an adult, conscious student.

 “Kami-sama! Aka-chan, you're a fucking oyabun in this suit!”

Having got out of the taxi, Akashi raised his eyebrows sarcastically; being dressed in an expensive double suit he really looked like a young yakuza boss, and later no one could figure out why Kuroko and Aomine burst into hysterical laughter.

 FIN.

 


End file.
